It has been a while since I have updated the blog, and for mostly good reasons!  Mikie did have his surgery, and all went well. I did try to update the blog from the hospital but there were problems with justblogme.com.  And besides that, our stay in the hospital was so brief, only one day.  So, here’s the story or Mikie’s latest ordeal.

My last post indicated we might do surgery in late October and things went just about as planned, but some things did change.  On the Monday before the surgery when we went to the hospital to place the pic line we hit a few snags.  Evidently the people who were going to place the pic line saw Mikie’s previous records about the impossibility of doing so.  (Remember, that is the main reason Mikie was sent home last time, there was no more that they could do because of Mikie’s vein health.)  Dr. Locke came and met with us in the waiting room and we discussed our options.  We had an appointment to meet with a new medical doctor for Mikie, one with hospital privileges, that morning and we decided to go there and let him assist us in finding our if Mikie was really able to go through surgery. There was concern that Mikie was on a blood thinner and that he might have to come off that for a week prior to surgery.  Some blood tests were ordered and also a cat scan of his hips.  We were off to see our new doc, Dr. Daniels of Family Practice, a fairly new doctor’s office close to the hospital.  We met Dr. Daniels and he met Mikie.  We were able to take care of the blood work right there and we got the results soon after we got home. Dr. Daniels and Dr. Locke got together and we all decided to go ahead with the surgery.  We told Dr. Locke we were ok with proceeding with the surgery on the hip itself rather than just soft tissue surgery. The pic line would be placed prior to the surgery.

Tuesday morning we arrived and the hospital and proceeded to parts of the hospital we had not seen before.  We figured it out as we went.  We had often come into the hospital via the emergency room, not normal admitting.  We also were being treated as a pediatric patient, so we saw different areas because of that.  And the hospital had made some changes due to the new heart center facilities opening next door, giving up space they used to use for heart patients.  There were some delays and snags that probably only Dr. Locke can explain, but after getting a pic line placed we were bumped back to around 11:30 AM for the surgery. From what we heard the pic line placement went very well and since it did not need to be placed in the groin but was placed in the arm, Dr. Locke said we should do the hip surgery on both hips.  He showed us the CT-Scan where both hips were dislocated and that the sockets had either not fully formed or degenerated over the years. It explained much of Mikie’s recent discomfort.

The surgery went well.  It is called a bilateral Girdlestone surgery.  It has nothing to do with girdles or stones, I think it was the name of the ortho-doc that came up with it. Basically the femoral head of the thigh bone and layering the muscle tissue back over it.  Since this takes the tension of the tendons there was no need to do the soft tissue surgery.  After one week the doc say him and said he is doing well and he removed the stitches. He noticed one hip is swollen.

We were told recovery will probably be at three or more weeks, we are almost finished at week two and Mikie is still very tender.  The incision on one hip was healing nicely until Mikie got into it with his little fingers yesterday.  We were able to close it back up with some butterfly bandages.  It looks fine now.  The other hip is still quite swollen and has taken to draining enough that we have to change the bandage several times a day.  The tape strips seem to be holding it closed quite well except in one little spot and I have not attempted to close it with a butterfly bandage but left open to allow drainage.

As of yesterday we noticed Mikie is blotchy and rather agitated.  We stopped giving him the Tylenol with codeine and gave him some Benadryl this morning. He is sitting in his chair and after just checking him it looks like the blotches are fading.  He is groggy from the Benadryl and morning seizure meds but still not as restful as I’d like to see him. I’m going to lay him down now and will try to write more later, maybe this evening.