Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Surgery Success!!


Josie had her surgery today and she came through like a champ. She was her classic guy smiley self up until they took her into the procedure room (which did make me wonder whether she has been pulling my leg all these months with all of the eating every two hours...she hadn't eaten since 2 AM the morning of the surgery and she didn't have surgery until 11:30 AM. Yet she was still chipper. So why does she yell in my ear every two hours all night long acting like she is starving???).

Her surgery was a trans-urethral ureterocele puncture (for a super technical summary of ureterocele puncture research look here). The cast of thousands of doctors involved in the procedure all seemed very satisfied with how it went. The pediatric anaesthesiologists (who even knew there were such things, although I am very happy that there are...) thought that 6 kg (13 lbs) was plenty big for safe anaesthesia. The pediatric urologists said the procedure went smoothly with no complications. And Josie, well Josie cried with the voice of a 30 year smoker for about 15 minutes but now she is back to her smiley self (they put a breathing tube in which gives a person a sore throat).

In all likelihood we will be discharged tomorrow and will get to go home. Yay!!

On a side note, if you ever consider spending time in a hospital only a few months before they are moving to their new super swanky multi-billion dollar digs, I recommend strongly against it. It's sort of like being in Panama after the Americans turned the canal over. All of the infrastructure is falling down around you and no one seems to care. In Panama all the highways were full of potholes and the railroad no longer ran. Here at the UCLA med center all the walls have holes in them, the ceiling tiles are falling down, and the men's room is more full of graffiti than the bathroom in a New York subway station.

We'll have a chance to check out the new hospital when Josie comes back for her full-on reconstruction/repair of her duplicated system (two ureters instead of one).

Hopefully my next post will be more about something fun like a funny thing that Lucy said or somewhere cool that we went with Grandma Jo. Enough of this medical hoo-ha.

1 comment:

Scott said...

Glad to hear it all went well - I hope life returns to (what passes for ) normal around the Brigham-Allen household!