Garry went into the operating room around 8:30pm on November 13th. Knowing you are now going to be waiting through a long surgery and having been fighting for so long beforehand, we went out for a sort of prayerful, tension, celebration dinner. It was hard to leave him but there was nothing more to do but know he was in the hands of a team of transplant surgeons. The few of us who had been up for days went for a sleep at the hotel after this, and the rest of the family went to the family waiting room outside of the ICU to wait for any word.
I woke up in the night and we all went back to the ICU to wait and doze in chairs. The surgeon walked in at 5am. It was a complicated surgery, but he did well. We took a deep breath. We hugged our surgeon. We got to go in and see him shortly after that.
Seeing Garry was hard. He was swollen, bruises from the IVs, and on a ventilator. They kept him asleep resting for the first day since he was so sick going into the transplant. I went back for more sleep while he was, knowing there was more to come, and feeling bone-tired from all we had been through.
He was also on 24hr dialysis to help his kidneys and to get the retained fluid off of his body. We took a breath too soon and there was more fighting to do. It felt like we were working backwards now but on the right side of things. It was hard seeing him in that state and we all took an hour or two at a time to sit with him and let him heal, rotating out of the family room just outside the doors.
His body started to right itself slow and steady. The second day his eyes opened a bit while I was stroking back his hair. The next he started to nod and squeeze hands. The yellow color started to come out of his skin right away. His blood numbers were righting everyday too.
On the fourth day he got the breathing tube out and traded it for an oxygen mask. We kept hearing the doctors say the word "good' and it kept us breathing too. On day five he sat, lifted, into a wheelchair. And, on day six the nurse said he had had eight litres of fluid taken off of him through dialysis within the last 24 hours, in the end it was twelve total. He did a swallow test to see if he could try eating, and had some soup and Jello to follow. Then they actually took him off dialysis completely as his kidney's were restoring function.
On day seven I raced in that morning from Easter Seals House to catch Garry making his first phone call home to wish our son a Happy Tenth Birthday. I took a picture for that surgeon who we had pleaded with. He gave me a big hug when I showed him later in the hall. Also on day seven, Garry was moved out of ICU and back to the transplant floor to do the rest of his recovery. After that I stayed in room with Garry overnight again as you really need your people to walk you through. It is both a physical and emotional fight, and he felt like it was going too fast, even though it was truly good.
On day eight that dreaded feeding tube came out and we cheered. Garry ate real food, the first in weeks. On the transplant floor he started working with physio to gain back strength and start to walk again, needing a walker to begin with.
His liver enzymes wavered and that was scary, but the transplant nurses and the doctors assured us that everyone deals with rejection and it's not the big rejection, they just have to get medications to the right dose for the individual. Still, they checked that flow from his new liver was working well.
Garry continued to progress at that good spot, the doctors got his medication up a bit and that worked to get his liver numbers going in the right direction, and after one week on the transplant floor he was released from VGH.
We stayed the first night close by at Easter Seals house and then onto our home stay with a generous family in Delta. Our kids joined us a week later. Garry is keeping up appointments as an outpatient starting at first with clinic appointments twice a week with our transplant team; nurse, doctor, social worker, dietician, and pharmacist included. He quickly moved to a once a week appointment, and at this point is doing so well that he has only had to return to clinic every two weeks, with labs twice a week locally continuing.
It really was from death to life. The story is not over, and we hope that by saying these things out loud we can help someone to lean on our words.... the familiarity, perspective, or information to cut through some of the fearful unknown.
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