Tomorrow is Easter Sunday

[Moveon]

And tomorrow my 90 year old mother will go in for colon surgery to remove a cancer from her colon. She went into the ER last Thursday and Saturday morning when I went to see her in the hospital the first words out of her month was. "I've got cancer. The had a CT performed Friday and was started on Antibiotics after she was admitted on Thursday evening. The pain in her lower right quadrant was eased somewhat by morphine and antibiotics. We thought it was just an infection of the ascending bowel but it turned out to be a mass. A colonoscopy confirmed it was a mass and didn't look right. So the colo/rectal surgeon came in today and told her that he was going to operate on her tomorrow morning. She's a pretty tough lady and was out mowing the yard last year but this year had not been feeling too well. Now we know why?

This makes me want to go talk to my doctor and schedule a colonoscopy to check my colon.

I have an old neighborhood friend who has been fighting colon cancer the last year or so. It's more prevalent than we think. They call it the silent killer because sometimes by the time you know you have colon cancer it's already well developed. It all depends on how aggressive the cancer cells are. They are not all the same.

I hope that God is looking down on her tomorrow when she has her surgery. They put in a PIC Line tonight and after the IV therapy team left her room the line started bleeding quite a bit. They had to return and clean and redress the IV site. When I left her bedside this evening it was doing better. She's eating and feeling pretty good. She is no longer in pain.

Tomorrow she will be in God's hands and I hope he guide the surgeon to perform a miracle and they get the cancer out of her. They are planning to take out about 6" of her colon and then sew the colon back up again using small incisions in her abdomen.

Prayers are welcome.

[LJP]

Prayers for your Mother and you.

[waterdog101]

praying for your mother, be sure to spend as much time with her as you can, while you can. God bless you both..

[TrackerMike]

We will be praying for her as well, but remember, she is in His hands already.

[Moveon]

The surgery went pretty well this am on Sunday Easter Morning. She was the only surgery scheduled for today.

The surgeon removed 6" of her ascending colon and her appendix along with some lymph nodes. The Surgery only lasted about an hour and a half. Pretty fast as I was reading where it can take up to 4 hours.

He said that he got all the mass out of her Colon and didn't see anything else abnormal in her abdomen.

But he is sending some tissue samples to a pathologist to find out more. The mass looked like cancer and you never know if it's spread or not until later.

The mass was stuck to the side of her abdominal wall and had to be removed from there. That is why she was in pain. If not for the sticking to the abdominal wall she would have not felt any pain as the colon doesn't feel pain that way.

Back in 2012 she has a bout of diverticulitius and inflammation in the colon after undergoing hip surgery. That problem (infection of the colon wall) was treated with antibiotics and resolved itself. She was put on a high fiber diet but didn't really follow it properly.

This time in 2016 the surgeon removed the diseased tissue. He stapled her colon back together and sewed her back up. They were able to do this laproscopically and only needed three small incisions (1" long) in her abdomen to get the instruments and camera into the abdomen.

She is back in her regular hospital room now but not out of the woods yet. She is sore and it's hard to move around but they want her to get up and start walking as soon as possible. She can get up and walk to the bathroom from the bed with assistance. They will try to wean her back onto a regular diet in the next few days.

She is still receiving antibiotics via a PIC line in her arm that goes directly from the upper arm into the vein and up to the superior vena cava and into the heart. This PIC line (peripherally inserted central catheter PICC or PIC for short) can also be used to give Chemo therapy.

Depending on the lab report she may or may not have to undergo chemo. She tolerated the operation pretty well today and was up watching the Notre Dame vs North Carolina Basketball game tonight. She is a fighter and pretty tough bird for 90 and 1/2 years old.

Thank you for the prayers everyone. I believe that they are working. The next step is to get back on a solid food diet and find out more about the lab results.

I was pretty devastated when told that she had cancer. But after today I'm hopeful that she can overcome this disease and live a while longer. I'm keeping my fingers crossed and doing a lot of praying.

[Moveon]

The doctor came into the hospital room and smiled and told us that my mom did NOT have cancer. They removed all the benign tumor from her colon and she hopefully will recover. She will NOT have to undergo chemo therapy. That is the good news.

Mom still needs to eat and has been put on a soft food diet. She can have soup, Eggbeaters, mashed potatoes instead of just Jell-O and Yogurt. She has been kidding the nurses and telling them that she want's to have PRIME RIB. Maybe when she is released from the hospital or rehab center if she has to go there.

She is getting up out of bed and has been walking around the unit with assistance. Today she didn't feel very well. She has something wrong with her left lung from being in bed too long. They gave her some new antibiotics today and at first it made her a little nauseous. But she felt better this afternoon after she got up out of bed. She didn't get to walk around the unit today as she was not up to it today. But tonight she was able to drink some "BOOST" energy/protein shake and that was a good sign. She also passed to major milestones for people who are recovering from Large Bowl Operations. She passed gas and had a Bowel Movement. Believe it or not these are major improvements after having part of your large colon removed. She is doing a little bit better today, but she is not out of the woods yet.

She has pneumonia in her left lung and a little fluid in there too. A new X-Ray showed this.

She is getting a new antibiotic that's given to people after having colon surgery. It's a little bit stronger than the Ciprofloxacin that she has been getting. She has a PIC Line which makes giving her IV fluids much easier than having just a regular IV line.

I've been staying with her most all day and into the early evenings. She was sick to her stomach today and she thought she was going to die. But she did much better after she got used to the new medicines.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.

[Moveon]

She is going into rehab for a couple of weeks to get her strength back up. She is eating solid foods now. But she had an X ray and it showed some Plural Effusions in her left lung. So the Hospitalist Dr prescribed some antibiotics and breathing medicine along with some anti cough medicine for her to take. I picked them up for her today and helped her check into the rehab center and get settled into her room. She will have inpatient rehab and evaluation tomorrow. The plan is to get her strong enough to go back to her own home. She lives on the other side of town. It's about a 40 mile round trip back and forth between my house and hers. Last year she was cutting part of her own grass with a self propelled lawn mower. A neighbor also helps her cut the rest of her yard out of the goodness of his heart. He is a great guy. This way I don't have to load up the Snapper rider into the back of my small pick up truck and take it back and forth between her house and mine. It's very dangerous trying to ride the snapper rider up the 12ft long 2"X12"x 12' long planks. The snapper often will stall and slip a gear while trying to climb up those ramps into the back of my truck and the lawnmower could fall of the planks with me on it. I'd break a leg easily if that happens. I got stuck on it last fall and almost fell off the lawnmower trying to load it onto the truck bed.

Hopefully the antibiotic and other medicines will help her lungs heal better. She has a mild case of pneumonia which people often get in the hospital following colon surgery according to the medical reports that I've been reading.

[Moveon]

Today it's been only 7 days since mom's colon surgery last Easter Sunday. It's been a long week but progress is being made.

She is doing much better now. She still is weak in the abdominal area and needs to rebuild those abdominal muscles in order to be able to get up out of bed more easily and be self dependent at home.

She will receive physical and occupational therapy for the next few weeks. They hopefully have good people for that. I've not met them yet. They don't work on the weekends and only work on Mon though Friday. So Monday I'll get the meet then and watch them work with my mom.

Just last fall my mom was out cutting part of her grass with a self propelled push mower and now this spring she is in a rehab facility. It happens so fast but was not totally unexpected. She kept telling me that she was feeling weaker and going downhill last winter. A few days she would say she wasn't feeling well and the next days she was feeling better. We had no idea until she went to ER last week that she had a mass/infection growing on the walls of her colon inside her. And we would not have gone to the ER to check her out except that the mass was starting to infect and adhere to her abdominal wall and causing her pain. Pain is a good thing in that it alerts us that some thing is wrong and needs to be checked out.

I can remember back in the 1960's watching Star Trek and seeing them using imaging equipment in the sick bay and cell phones (communicators) to talk to each other from the ship to the surface of another planet. I never imagined that kind of equipment would be in use in the year 2016. In a way Start Trek was predicting the future!. Or maybe they already knew what the future looked like some how? But it's something to think about. If not for the CAT SCAN and X ray machines and Cell phones my mom may not still be alive and healing up. Who really knows what the future holds for each one of us. Live life to the fullest while you can.

Hopefully you all had a better Easter Sunday that we did. But then again it could have been a lot worst. So I'm thankful to God that mom is still hear and I'm able to still be with her. I lost my father back in 2001. He died from complications of prostate cancer and a uncontrolled bladder infection that could not be controlled. I some times think that the cancer has spread to his bladder and that is why none of the antibiotics they tried worked to control his infection. He died in his sleep the night of Sept 4th, 2001. Just a few days later the events of 911 unfolded. He had a major stroke on June 2nd 1993 and was paralayzed on his entire left side for 8 years after that. My mom took him home and took care of him there for 8 years 4 months and 3 days until he passed. He was my best friend and fishing buddy. And actually he married a woman who also enjoyed fishing almost as much as he did. LOL My mom use to row the boat around so that dad could bass fish. Now that's the right kind of woman IMHO. After my father passed I decided to take my mom on a fishing trip to KY lake close to the same area that dad and I fished for many years. Mom was a trooper and actually caught the biggest crappie between the two of us during this crappie fishing tournament. Of course I ran the boat and put her in the right spots. . I'll miss her if she leaves this world.