Home at Last!

After a 15 week stay at the hospital, I am finally home! My original surgery was on May 10th and I was finally discharged August 27th. We believed the original surgery went very well, and I actually made it home for a day and a half in May after I was successfully able to eat on my own. However, a severe pain developed in my stomach, and I was soon in the ER after a considerable amount of prodding from my wife and dad (I didn't want to go). Since then I have had three more surgeries to try and get rid of blockages that have developed in my small intestines.

Unfortunately, the plumbing is still not working after the forth surgery and I still cannot eat anything. My surgeon decided that we should not do another surgery in the near future because we do not know if it is a mechanical problem (like a physical blockage), or a functional problem (the bowels are stunned and have not "woken up" yet. Because of this, the doctors decided their is no reason to keep me in the hospital and I now have a I/V nutrition system (called a TPN -- Total Parenteral Nutrition) that we can administer ourselves. I am in quite a bit of discomfort because my stomach is very distended. If this does not improve soon, we will probably put a tube into my stomach that we can use to drain fluid and decompress my stomach. This will be a bit of an inconvenience, but I would be a lot more comfortable and be able to do more things. Right now I am a bit limited in what I can do.

Currently, the priority is to get going with the chemotherapy again, which will I start tomorrow. It is a bit concerning because I am several months behind the original schedule on getting the chemo going, and the pathology report from the surgery indicated the cancer was of an aggressive variety. Of the 18 lymph nodes that were removed, 17 of them showed evidence of metastasis. We are going to change the original treatment plan, as my oncologist does not want to give me the full blast of chemo while I am not 100%.

My nursing staff at TMC was terrific. We got to know each other really well over the past 4 months and they took very good care of me. The picture above is the nursing staff that was there on the day I was discharged.