Thursday Morning

Tammy will be getting a blood transfusion this morning. Her blood levels are very low, she is pale and feeling rather weak and tired. Low blood levels are normal following surgery but with her symptoms, getting extra blood is supposed to help considerably. Tammy feels she can use any extra help avaliable and has chosen to get the blood transfusion.

Tammy slept much better last night but has not eaten much of anything. I am not terribly worried because as I recall and as you may recall, her last post-op hospital stay in March followed a similar cycle of eating well then not and then having a pretty tumultuous day before being discharged the next day. If the cycle continues we will be discharged tomorrow but I have not heard anything about discharge at this point. Much still has to happen before we can be discharged. Today should be a big day so we'll see how things go.

Since last evening, Tammy has been sleeping most of the time but overall Tammy has been much more "with it" and alert than last surgery. This surgery she has chosen to avoid taking Oxycodone and is instead taking Dilaudid. Pre-surgery she found Dilaudid worked better for her and the one time she ran out of Dilaudid and tried Oxy, it really upset her stomach.

Last night at 3AM, I was presented a scapel by our nurse and allowed to cut up Tammy's pink pillow wedge that goes between her knees/legs. These wedges come in a one size doesn't fit all form. Since Tammy is so short the pink wedge was way too wide and long and she needed it trimmed down. I tried getting a good knife from our day nurse yesterday (you will remember her from the last post, we will continue to call her Sam) and she offered me a plastic butter knife or some fisher price children's scissors. I told her neither of those would work and I tried again with our night time nurse and she got me a scalpel and thats how I ended up carving Tammy's pillow at 3AM. I really liked our night time nurse and for me having a good night time nurse is more important than during the day because frankly at night I am just too tired to deal with this but during the day I am prepared to fight. Those scalpels are really nice and sharp btw; it worked much better easier than hacking at the thing with our kitchen knife like I did in March.

At 5:30AM Tammy noticed her new waterfall. Tammy really likes waterfalls. The waterfall I am referring to is the humidifier water thing attached to her oxygen which I mentioned in a comment on the last post. Tammy woke up and said "what's that water running?"

While writing this post, I have been able to get Tammy to eat some applesauce and gelatin. It would also be nice if our not so friendly friend called Nausea would say goodbye today. Hopefully Tammy will be able to eat without that not so friendly friend causing any trouble. Some big things we are anticipating today include: the blood transfusion, saying goodbye Catheter and hello Commode, and transferring. Benny, Destiny and several friends are expected to stop by today.