A new day

I come to you later in the evening similar to last night. I'm sitting in Roger's ICU room next to his bed, its 9:45. Its been another long day ~ but a good day in light of where we are. We - more importantly ROGER - has come a long way. At the risk of boring you with detail, here is where we've been: When I left Roger last night to grab a couple hours sleep in one of the waiting rooms, he was dozing on and off. In ICU, the nurse-to-patient ratio is approximately 1-1. Nurses are in the room at minimum once an hour and really quite a bit more than that. Roger had loads of poking and prodding combined with a cacophony of machines wheezing, whirling, buzzing, and whistling. No matter how "quiet" it is, it actually is incredibly noisey.

After grabing a couple hours sleep in one of the waiting rooms, I came back up to Roger's room around 3:30. The night nurse was getting Roger ready to sit up in bed. It was a tense, painful process, but he ended up sitting upright approximately 12 hours after his surgery!! During the day today, the nurses had Roger up and out of bed, sitting up right in a chair TWICE for approimately 45 minutes each time. Again, he was in loads of pain and made good use of his pain "button" but he still managed to sit upright outside of the bed. This is important as it helps him take larger lung-fuls of air which helps keep liquids (pneumonia) out of his lungs. Throughout all the pain, Roger has been an absolute hero. He grimaces and winces with pain but still follows through with the activity/exercise.

Roger's color is beautiful - close to his normal rudy complexion. All other more technical indicators also appear to be good. The surgeon met with us twice today - once in the morning and again at the end of the day. He stated that Roger was doing very well. He geniuinly seemed pleased to see Roger sitting up right and to hear that Roger wanted to do a small walk around the floor.

The dressings came off of two of Roger's incisions - he has approximately a 7-8 inch incesion on his chest from breast bone downward and a second one that starts under his armpit and stretches around 8 inches arching across his back. He has a chest drainage tube to get all the fluids out of his chest, a naso/gastric tube to prevent any fluids from going down his throat to what remains of his esophagus towards the stomach, and then he has a feeding tube that will send nutrients to his small intestines directly. Its a whole lotta stuff - but having said that, his incisions look good (no inflamation, discoloration, etc) and thethe nurses/doctors have started unplugging Roger from some of the machines/etc.

The doctor surprised us with the announcement that Roger was doing so well that they wanted to move him from ICU to the "regular" surgery floor today. Sadly we got our hopes up only to find out at the end of the day that they were NOT going to move Roger because of logistics issues not related to Roger. So, we spend another quiet...not so quiet... night in ICU. The nurses will whiz in and out to check on him hourly. Hopefully his sheer exhaustion will allow him to sleep through it all. He has used his earplugs to drown out as much of the hallway noise and I have shut the door. I'll be leaving shortly to go find a quiet spot in one of the waiting areas on one of the floors to grab some sleep myself.

There were many - almost too many "Roger" moments today. Some entirely tooooooo inappropriate to share with you in writing. Those will need to be shared verbally.... however an early one in the day involved his feeding tube. The nurses came in to give Roger his first feeding - a horrible baby-poop brownish looking liquid. They tried to access his feeding tube only to find out that the surgery team used some sort of feeding tube connector that they were not familar with. The nurses brought in other nurses, and nursing supervisors, and doctor residents, etc all to see if they knew what connector to use with this feeding tube to administer the food substance properly. Roger quietly sat through many of these conversations and finally interjected to our primary nurse Josh, "why don't you go to Lowes Hardward for the fitting. They probably have it in the plumbing isle." Josh laughed and walked away. Later today, still no fitting in place, another nurse came in with Josh to try a fitting she had. As she was attaching the devise to the feeding tube she matteroffactly stated to Josh (and Roger)...."Lowes was out of this - I got this fitting at Home Depot" Apparently the word is out on the floor among all the nurses about our dear Roger.

Its hard not to be enthusiastic for the small moments of what appear to be progress - good color, mobilility, pleasant disposition, etc. We know that we're not "out of the woods" yet but it feels pretty wonderful from where I'm sitting.

The first two photos are from yesterday the surgery day. The first one - the smallest - shows Roger holding his painkiller magic button. The second one is his "thumbs up". The following two pictures are from today when Roger was upright in a chair.

Good night to all ~ Angie