Home Again
Posted By Russ Emerson on December 28, 2007 at 11:25 am
Home is the sailor from the sea,
the hunter from the hill. *
And the computer geek from the hospital.
Yeah, try making that fit a rhyme.
Update: Maggie nails it in the comments.
Not So Brief Setback
Posted By Russ Emerson on December 26, 2007 at 9:40 pm
Alternate title: “Dammit dammit dammit.”
The visit to Duke today went about as expected, with a lot of hurry-up-and-wait-ing. Blood work, x-rays, and a cat scan. I forgot to bring Mycah with me, but fortunately, they had their own cats.
The long and the short of it is, the tube that runs from my head down my neck, over my collarbone, down to the area of my liver, and thence into the peritoneal cavity has in fact not stayed inside the peritoneal cavity. The imaging today showed that it retracted out and is neatly coiled above my liver, which accounts for the softball-sized swelling there.
How it did that, I don’t know. Maybe they neglected to take into account the fact that I’m way taller than average.
Because the fluid is deposited between the skin and the muscle, it can’t be disposed of as effectively as if it were being dumped in the abdomen, so it builds up. The pressure is about the same as in my head, so the cerebro-spinal fluid can’t drain out, so my condition is much like it was before the shunt surgery.
The upshot is, they have to crack me open again and place the tubing back inside the peritoneum. My skull is fine, so they ought to be able to do this by unzipping the scar on my stomach.
Which they’re doing first thing tomorrow morning.
Egads. I never seem to get a chance to plan ahead for these things.
It’s a simple enough procedure that it could be out-patient work, but I’ll probably have to spend tomorrow night in the hospital. Ugh. I hate the beds there. At least the nurses are cute.