Your Unreliable Narrator

Stacey corrected me on a few non-facts that appeared in the post below. First, the turkey-baster guy (who is actually the plastic surgeon Dr. Davidson, who did the whole flap thing to wonderful effect and is actually a lovely man, so we will call him TLDD.) OK, TLDD pulled the drain (just one) the week before last. Yay! He thought there might be some infection at the site, so he gave her some antibiotics.

Over last weekend the site got all red and swollen; Stacey was going in on Tuesday anyway, because TLDD wanted to check the site. It was clear that there was some collection of fluid, but he couldn’t aspirate anything. (The first aspiration was when the drain originally came out.)

SO! TLDD decided that he wanted to put the drain back in. Booo! So on Wednesday she went in to Newton Wellesley to have the drain put in. While they were prepping her (always a challenge because of course my sister has no veins) they took her temperature and it was 101. They rechecked later and it was 102. But they decided to place the drain anyway, got all the fluid out.

At the time she was under conscious sedation “Which is a ripoff,” Stacey said “because it just makes you feel sleepy; if you’re going to give me drugs, gimme the good stuff!” Also who knows if it worked; because of the surgery, Stacey doesn’t have any sensation there anyway, so it’s a waste of time. “But to add insult to injury, if you get this conscious sedation you have to sit around for three or four hours so they can observe you. i just wanted to go home and go to bed with my fever!”

While she was being observed, TLDD came in to take a look at her tummy. He was happy with the drainage but didn’t like the looks of a small area of the original incision. “It looks funky,” he said. (OK, no he didn’t.)

So he took a pair of scissor and POPPED IT OPEN, stuck his fingers in there and took out all this goop. Eeeeeew! So now she’s got two or three inches of open incision, and a fever that went up to a high of 104… and she’s not going anywhere. The fever was up and down all day: chills, then sweats to soak the bed, then chills again, yadda yadda yadda.

it got interesting again yesterday: they did a CT scan to make sure the site was free of fluids, pus, aliens, whatever. TLDD also called in the Infectious Disease guys to see what the hell was going on in there. Meanwhile, he had taken a culture of the stuff he pulled out and it started growing staph. ID told him he was too agressive and needed to relax; thus far, Stacey’s medical staff has tended to err on the side of caution and we LIKE that, so shut up ID. “They were a humorless bunch,” Stacey said, which I guess is the risk you run when you hang around flesh-eating bacteria and Ebola and Dengue Fever all day.

That’s the scoop. Since then, the fever has gone down and as long as that continues, she’ll be coming home tomorrow. So if you want to send flowers or treats or an Amazon Kindle, send them to the house.

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