Hi everybody and a very big Happy Belated Mother's Day to all the Moms out there! I was going to post on Sunday, but decided to take the day off :) Seriously, all we did was lounge around all morning, Stephen took a big nap, and then we went over to Bill's parent's house for a crab and shrimp feast. YUM!! It was a wonderful day! Bill actually took me out Saturday night to celebrate Mother's Day, just the two of us. We had such a great time chatting about the past year and reminiscing about everything we've been through. It's fun to laugh at all of the craziness and all the times we walked around the hospital late at night like zombies. Oh, and the time I fell asleep in the cafeteria! I think we sat and ate and chatted over drinks for more than 2 hours (a huge shout out to Cafe Milano!!). We're at such a better place with Stephen and everything else than we were last Mother's Day. He was still a very sick little pumpkin last year and now this year, we're really looking forward to what is coming next!
And we now have a date for surgery #4; Friday, June 15th. It should a quick procedure, albeit, not very painless for poor Stephen. But hopefully this will be the last surgery before transplant. To date, he's been put under general anesthesia three times for a total of eight procedures; double nephrectomy, peritoneal dialysis (PD) catheter placement, feeding tube placement, incisional hernia repair, inguinal hernia repair, Mediport placement, PD catheter removal and placement of a new one, and incisional hernia repair again. Thankfully, they've been able to combine a lot of procedures at one time to minimize the number of times he's needed to be under general anesthesia.
Our only hiccup for this next surgery will be if we can't get Stephen's sodium up. We did labs on Friday and learned during dialysis clinic yesterday that his sodium has dropped, but his blood pressure is still elevated. Typically, when your blood pressure is high, it means your sodium is high too. So it's a bit of a mystery as to what is happening. It would make sense if Stephen was fluid overloaded and retaining fluid, but he definitely is not. And I definitely don't want to "dry him out" by switching dialysis fluids again. The last time, they got him WAY TOO dry and he ended up getting really sick and we spent the day in the ER. So we re-did his lab work to make sure there wasn't any fluke with the lab and hopefully the doctors will come up with solution. Because if we don't get his sodium up, the anesthesiologist won't put Stephen under. You might remember we had the exact same thing happen last year when Stephen was having seizures and he needed to be sedated for an MRI. They wouldn't do it because his electrolytes were so out of whack.
Hopefully we won't hit any snags and all go go off on schedule. We really need to get this done so the bladder stuff can be checked off the list and we can move forward with his transplant...our ultimate goal for the year!!!
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