Full Circle .... almost

I am over the moon to finally be finishing this update from HOME !!! Jackjack was released today & is comfortable, if not moved too much. My brain is feeling pretty scrambled so I am thinking of doing a "what happened" in a couple of parts .... below is the update I've been working on since I originally said I would post (I have no idea what day it is today let alone what day I started promising!).

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Replaying the days since Friday over, in my head, is scary. Now that I have had a bit of time to sit (& Jack be comfortable), I realize, fully, how scary this has been. I realize how close we were to spending time in the ICU.

The way Jack came out of surgery Friday was reassuring. Both surgeries went as planned & with excellent results. He was comfortable Friday night, slept well, woke happy & without pain. 

I keep trying to remember if something specific happened around 2:00 on Saturday afternoon & in fact I know I am not the only one who is trying to remember. By 3:00 Saturday, Jack had absolutely no pain control. It was as though someone had flipped a switch. He went from resting to screaming, crying out "ow me, ow me" over & over. From lying sweetly still to writhing, arching his back, wringing his hands or flailing his arms. Picking him up hurt him even more. No matter what they tried he continued, without change, without stop, without relief until he was basically put to sleep. We tried to comfort him but couldn't, no matter what we tried, knowing he was in pain was hard but being unable to comfort him at all was heart-breaking. 

Jack had also started to retain water & stop producing urine, which ended up in ortho having to cut his cast in half to allow him room to breathe. Shortly after an anti-inflammatory (Toradol) & before Morphine were added, Jack's eyes & eyelids started to swell. Not swelling a little bit, but swelling to the point of alarming the Dr.'s (& there were many coming & going). By midnight they had completely swelled shut & his eyeballs looked like tapioca .... thousands of little fluid bubbles. We are still unsure if this was an allergic reaction or his body's reaction to the stress. No one can figure this out .... it was just so, so strange. 

Although now that we have had even more time to think about it ~ there was one component to the anaesthetic during surgery that was changed & held constant through both trips to the OR this weekend. Again, after replacing his cast on Sunday, his eyes swelled shut .... luckily not as dramatically as Saturday evening. I will be requesting that his anaesthetic return to the one that worked his 4 trips into the OR previously!

We had started in a double room but were moved around 9 pm Saturday  into a private room, next to the nursing station, with 1 on 1 nursing. Xray and ultrasound came up to the room to make sure that nothing surgical had happened to be causing Jack's pain. Both returned normal, all pins were still in place & although his testicle showed swelling, it was still in place & not twisted. It was finally Dr. Carter (we had exhausted every other member of the pain management team) who came up right after a full day of surgery (9:00pm), after her shift was done & stayed with us until Jack was basically anesthetized (12:30am). Now that I think of the reason(s) she stayed, it scares me & yet makes me incredibly grateful at the same time. The medications Jack needed by that time (& the amounts for that matter) were dangerous & held a high possibility of stopping his breathing... but they worked, keeping him comfortable for periods of time. 

There were so, so many things going "wrong" with his body that it is hard, still, to tell what exactly happened. One of the medications, Ketamine, is used as a sedative when setting bones or putting drainage tubes in, was the one that eventually kept Jack asleep. He was at the highest dose he could be on, without being in the ICU & every time we tried to lower his dosage he would wake in pain again & we would be back at square one. This continued through Saturday night & Sunday morning.

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I am going to enjoy my first night home with my loves & continue the rest of Jack's saga over the next few days.

Thank you for hanging in with us (AGAIN!!)

XO,

A much relieved Steph