DAY- 84

Today was our sixth day in the hospital as we waited for the the neurological team of doctors to return from their Memorial Day weekend. The past days have been uneventful, and Jan's pain has been managed with morphine. In preparation for Jan's surgery this afternoon her platelets needed to be increased from 23,000 to 100,000. One bag of platelets was given Monday evening which raised her platelet number to 70,000. A second bag of platelets was given this morning, which raised the count once again, this time to 99,000. This was close enough for the neurological team and she was taken to surgery at 2:00 P.M. The procedure was performed by a female neurosurgeon named Dr. Jain. In addition to Jan's procedure, Dr. Jain had five other surgeries on the docket for today, including two craniotomies. The procedure she performed on Jan is called a balloon kyphoplasty...............

http://www.spineuniverse.com/displayarticle.php/kyphoplasty-questions-2790.html

Jan was placed under general anesthesia around 2:15. The surgery lasted less than an hour and went fine. She was returned to her room via stretcher at 5:00 P.M. She has plastic bubbles wrapped around both legs which are connected to a pump. The pump automatically inflates and deflates the plastic cast and aids in the prevention of blood cots. They told Jan to expect pain related to the procedure for the next two days. They fully expect her to be up and around by tomorrow, moving slowly of course. We are hopeful that she will be discharged in the next day or two so that we can return to our temporary apartment home. We begin our third month in the apartment tomorrow. We hope that we will be able to return to our home in Valrico in the next few weeks. We have recently learned that our avocado tree of ten years, which has never born fruit, has hundreds of small avocados growing. Jan is anxious to eat a home-grown Valrico avocado. We have not received any further information on the E-Coli urinary infection, but we believe that it is being well managed with the correct antibiotic. If all goes well, we should be able to resume Jan's recovery schedule very soon. The next major hurdle will be to strengthen her legs which have been weakened by the steroids to the extent that she has not been able to get out of bed, or stand from a seated position, for the past five weeks. This, they tell us, is not unusual for patients on high dose Prednisone. It has now been seven months and thirteen days since Jan was diagnosed with AML.