One day post op

It's nearly 9:00 PM.

Mom is out of ICU and on the 7th floor. She was moved about 6:00 PM.

She has a beautiful view of Mt. Rainier, the water and trees from her room.

It has been quite a day.This morning she had good pain management with her epidural. She was pretty stable but markedly tired.

They removed her arterial line from her left wrist and then the 3 lumen iv from her jugular on the right side of her neck. (seriously, it looked more like a garden hose coming out of her neck) As you can imagine, this was really nerve wracking and mom, dad and I had anxiety about it being removed with her so conscious and aware. She was nervous, jittery and shaking for a while after it came out. ( As were we) But there were no complications with either removal.

By afternoon the goal was to get her up out of bed and sitting in a chair.

The physical therapist came in to help with that. He did a strength assessment first and said she was really strong. ( Uhhhhhhhh yeah! Could have told you that!)

When they got her up to sit in the chair it was pretty painful. Her blood pressure dropped to a dangerous 58/24 for a while. The nurse was pretty busy calling Dr.'s and trying to get orders to best help her. They decided to shut off her epidural and give her some more fluids to try to boost the BP. She had been in the chair for 45 minutes.They had to get her back in bed and she was just so depleted at that point. We got her in bed and she started to rest. Her pain level started to escalate. They had turned off the epidural to assist in raising her blood pressure but now the pain was getting way ahead of her. They ask her to rate her pain on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the worst she can handle. She was feeling worse and worse and her nurse had stepped off the floor. The other nurses weren't sure what to do about the epidural and were hesitant to intervene yet as her nurse had been paged and was on his way back up. She was quickly at a 9.5 and what they call in "pain crisis" They paged the nurse again and he gave verbal orders to restart her epidural. It took a good 30 minutes for her to get it under control and relax a little . It was a super stressful hour but she has done well since then. He BP has been stable the rest of the day.

While we had been told we were going to be able to go back to 6SE, plans changed and no bed was available. It's hard to be disappointed for long though knowing that God is in control and has a plan. He is probably placing mom there as a blessing to someone new who needs her. That would only be the 1 millionth time that has happened. We ran into one of the ladies from 6SE and she was disappointed mom was not coming back and said she would "let everyone know". I expect mom will have some 6th floor visitors tomorrow.

So, specific prayer requests:

1) Pray for her tomorrow as she will be expected to sit up again. It makes us a bit nervous and mom is concerned as well. It's very important after surgery, but it is painful none the less and the BP is always a concern.

2) That she could start eating so the iv nutrition can go away. For now, she is mercifully nausea free, just on clear liquids for another 24 hours.

3) That her healing would come quickly and she will be home sooner than anyone expects.

4) For the nausea to stay away. ( As I write this she is eating chicken broth and she says it actually tastes good. Food has not been very appealing so we are thankful for this.)

Thank you again for all your prayers, love and support.

We appreciate you each and every one.

Kimberly and family.