Monterey, part 3 (the conclusion)

The same day as surgery was Donny's birthday. My mom had made me promise that I would do something with Donny for his birthday, but I still really wanted to see her. We went back to the hospital to check on her, but she kicked us out and told us to go celebrate. We went back to the motel to decide what to do.

Donny finally decided that he'd rather get some baseball cards and a baseball card magazine than go out and celebrate, so we headed to WalMart. I have to admit to being relieved, since I really didn't want to go out either. I ended up buying a big jug of orange juice while we were at the store. We then went back to our room and I laid in bed and drank orage juice. (Anybody who knows me knows that this is a bad sign, since I hate orange juice, but crave it like mad when I'm sick.) I drank almost half a gallon of ornge juice before I finally passed out. The day had finally caught up with me.

The next few days were spent visiting my mom in the morning, going to the room for a nap in the afternoon, and then back to the hospital in the evening. For the first couple of days mom did really good. She was progressing as expected and all seemed to be well, she was due to be discharged from the hospital on Thursday.

Thursday morning my mom started having severe pain. It was in her lower right abdomen, and the cramps were worse than giving birth to a 10 pound baby. (Yes, I was huge.) Because of the placement the doctor was baffled as to what the cause could be. He decided to give it a day and see how she was doing. In the meantime though she was recieving 4mg of morphine by IV every 1/2 hour, along with her liquuid lortab. They finally figured out that if they gave her both medications at the same time she'd actually get the pain controlled enough to sleep for a little while.

On Friday morning I arrived at the hospital at 7:00 a.m. to make sure that I didn't miss seeing the doctor. He talked to my mom and when she told him that the pain wasn't getting any better he decided to run a few more tests. He did a urine test looking for a UTI. He tested the stuff coming out of the drainage tube in her stomach to make sure that there wasn't too much of something in it, I can't remember what he was looking for now. And he ordered a CT scan to see if they could see the problem that way.

Around lunchtime the hospital called the doctor at his office and gave him the results of all the tests that had been run. He hopped in his car and drove across town to come deal with the problem immediately. Apparently mom's drainage tube had slipped down and that was the cause of all the pain. The doctor came in and removed himself because he wanted to be sure that removing it really did alleviate the pain. My mom said that immediately she felt better. She still had the soreness expected after surgery, but nothing like before.

Mom was kept one more night in the hospital, just to make sure that all was well again, and then she was finally allowed to come home. Even with all the pain she still says that it's worth it.