“Lucky Number 7”, or At Least I Hope So

As I write this, I’m laying here in ICU…Still. Thankfully, it’s not an isolated ICU, so friends and family can come and go. Most importantly my husband is allowed to be here everyday, so the days go by much quicker than the evenings. My “estimated” hospital stay of 1-2 days following surgery No. 7 is currently on Day 7 with a “possible discharge to acute rehab tomorrow”. However, I’ve been hearing this for quite a few days now. Unfortunately with my case, this is no surprise.

It’s a natural question to ask, “How long will you be in the hospital?” However, I have learned the hard way to take that “estimated” time period with a complete grain of salt. It’s NEVER what they estimate!

Something always seems to happen; be it a simple revision of my skin graft (Surgery No. 4) when they unexpectedly found 3 separate bacteria in my skull bone, and what was only meant to be a one-night stay turned into a full week vs. when I was released the same night after they removed a small part of my skull that was totally unconnected to the rest of my skull and excised a wound on my scalp (Surgery No. 5).

So, here I am, alive but not so well, after Surgery No. 7.

Yes. I thank God I’m alive, and that I’m coherent enough to even say that. I recall most details of my other surgeries. However, all I can recall from the first few days after this surgery was the horrific, excruciating pain. Mostly I was in and out of a painkiller haze. Yet, when I was actually awake, the slightest movement caused intense, shooting pains throughout my entire body. Now, this chick has got a serious threshold for pain! So, when they asked, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the pain?” and I could merely moan, “10” – you’ve got to understand just how severe this pain was.

Without getting into all the complexities of this 7th Surgery, I had a “shunt” or catheter placed into the area of my brain, where the tumors were removed and the radiation was beamed into where fluid would consistently flow. The fluid would sometimes cause increased swelling and thus, pressure in my brain. Now, with the shunt in place, the fluid will hopefully continuously flow out of the brain and be absorbed into the rest of my body. Science! It’s fascinating when you’re not the guinea pig.

I’ll have this shunt inside my body for as long as it holds up. It could be years, months. Again, who knows?

What I do know is that this has been one of the toughest, if not THE toughest surgeries so far. So, I hope and I pray that this will be Lucky Number 7 and I won’t have to see another Operating Room for a very, very long time.