Surgery... Again

Mom had been taking chemo for only two weeks and something was horribly wrong. It's early May 2008 and mom's systems are once again failing her. Nothing tastes good, she can't pass anything and she is starting to bloat up again. Dad contacts Dr. McDreamy. The two of them agree to get her back in the hospital immediately. The nurses and techs were expecting her. No sooner had they assigned her a room that they were already running tests and taking cat scans. I take another day off of work. Thank goodness for understanding bosses.

After the tests have been taken and mom is once again planted in her room, Dr. McDreamy is seated in the nurses station studying a computer monitor intently. I venture over, not really sure that I'm allowed behind the main desk. He's studying mom's cat scan and motions me over to look. He points to a large void in her abdomen.

"You can see that the intestines are distended here, but..." He shuttles through images of mom's cat scan, essentially taking us farther back into her abdomen. "Then, it just stops. The good news is, there's no spot or lump. But it just stops there." He now is moving back and forth between the different layered images, searching for some sign of what has gone wrong. "I'm not sure what's going on. We're going to have to go in there and find out." I thank him for his explanation and patience in explaining what he sees. He smiles and tells me "No problem." His smile carried a hint of worry. I know mine totes quite a bit of worry.

Soon, mom is once again wheeled off to prep for her operation. Once again, dad and I wedge ourselves into a corner of the all-too-small pre-op room as the nurses bustle about. Once again, we watch her being wheeled off through the large double doors toward the operating room, a full contingent of medical personnel in tow.

Days later (okay, maybe only a couple hours to those not rapt in worry), mom is once again out of surgery and recovering in her room. Dr. McDreamy shows up, his confident familiar smile across his face again. About a foot and a half of mom's small intestine had died. They think that it had twisted on itself and strangled this now dead section. They recect... rescect... reasec... cut out the deceased segment and reattached the healthy sections back together. Once again, we learn that a delay of a day, or even a few hours, could have killed her. She, and we, have been spared that again.

After a couple of days, mom was doing all those things the nurses want to see after that sort of procedure (Poop, pass gas, you know the drill), and mom went home again. Back to the grey industrial goo...