Successful Surgery and a Lonely Boat
05 November 2015 | Annapolis, Maryland
Donna
Bill’s brain surgery went very well. Unfortunately though, our 2-3 days in the hospital turned into 9 days. We are going to blame that on Advil. Besides the two days previous to the surgery that Bill couldn’t take this wonder drug, he also could not take it for a full week after surgery. Apparently there is not a lot of pain associated with cutting open your head and stapling it shut. The problem continues to be the tumors on Bill’s leg that are still increasing in size and causing a lot of pressure and pain whenever he moves. This caused a lot of trouble doing the kind of things that hospitals have to make sure you can do before they let you go home; like going to the bathroom. I won’t go into lurid details but Bill ended up in the inpatient rehabilitation center until they would let him take Ibuprofen again. They let him start taking it last Thursday night – a week after surgery – and he was finally well enough to go home on Saturday.
I was able to spend every minute at Johns Hopkins hospital with Bill. He moved within the hospital three times. First he was in the Neurological Critical Care Unit – which was an excellent experience. Then he moved onto the neurological unit and finally inpatient rehab. Every person we came in contact with, and there were a lot, was helpful and competent. The real problem was they didn’t leave us alone for a minute. The doctors would show up at 5:30am, sometimes earlier. Good thing we have experience waking up fast from our time at sea! From that point on other groups, some we didn’t even imagine existed came to talk to us. This is the first time in the 41 years Bill and I have been together that he has been admitted to a hospital. It wasn’t something we want to do again, but we were really impressed by the hospital and the staff. Even the art around the hospital is great!
Besides the pain in Bill’s leg, the only other issue is the weakness that remains in his left hand. He has started going to Occupational Therapy and Physical Therapy here at the hospital in Annapolis. He has made significant progress though, just as the doctor said he would. Bill has started taking the oral chemotherapy he used a couple of times before again and that seems to be helping a lot with the tumors on his leg. Finally today Bill got the many staples they put in his head out. He is still pretty exhausted but the neurosurgeon told us today that the type of anesthesia they use for brain surgery takes 4-6 weeks to leave his body. We still have a couple of weeks to go. Next comes some radiation therapy but we don’t have that scheduled yet.
Because Bill was actually feeling OK for the first time this morning we went to check out Moonraker and see how the boat was doing. She looked great – but very lonely. Moonraker was pretty weak too. The batteries were really low. We have been going back and forth on whether we want to take the boat out of the water for the winter or not. We still aren’t sure but we do have a spot reserved, just in case. We are hoping to go out on the boat for a couple of days if we can find a time when we don’t have a doctor’s appointment or a visitor scheduled. The enclosure, shown in the picture above, we had built this year finally is complete so we don’t have to worry about being too cold.