Two steps forward, one step back

We almost made it to a year. February passed and we were good. We had almost made it to September, yet there we were with Jay-Are in the hospital yet again with yet another bowel obstruction. Frustrating and scary and irritating and expected... Isn't that sad when you expect to go back to the hospital yet again?

The day started out ominously when Jay-Are woke up with severe stomach pains. While stomach pain is not unusual when you have been cut open the number of times he has, it usually is pretty obvious when it is a more worrisome type of pain. Bug and I left him home to rest while we went to church, but by the time we got home he still wasn't doing real great. We played it pretty low key for the day so that he could rest, but come 4pm or so it was obvious where this was heading. 

So we got ready for another round of this. Unfortunately we are old pros, so we got the Gameboy and the phone charger and changes of underwear, all those things you don't really think about until you need them. Jay-Are being the person that he is made sure to take the time to mow the front lawn before he would let us leave, because "if I'm going to be stuck in the hospital for a week, I don't want you to have to worry about it." Then we dropped bug off at our friends house that we are blessed to have live just down the block from us, and they offered to watch bug for us while we went to get Jay-Are checked out.

Once we finally got to the hospital it was slow going to get checked in. Who knew that 6pm on a Sunday night was a busy ER time? About an hour later Jay-Are was finally triaged and settled in with some pain and nausea medicine. They took him in to get an x-ray which as we expected showed something that could be a blockage. So off to CT. Based on all this information the recommendation was to keep him at a minimum of overnight to try and get the blockage to break up on its own, so they put him on NPO (Nothing by Mouth) and had him on IV fluids. They called in to the surgeon who did his last 2 surgeries and he will come and visit him the next day.

When we were getting transported to the room from the ER the transporter asked us if we had a room named after us yet after we told him how often we were in. You would think, but apparently just giving money to the hospital as a patient and not as a donation doesn't count!

In good spirits at least!

Always silly....

Monday mostly consisted of watching and waiting. For the good part of the day Jay-Are remained on fluids only, and then to a liquid diet. For dinner he was up to a soft diet, watching and waiting to see how his body handled things. The biggest challenge of the day by far was that he also was fighting a migraine, so it was hard for us to tell if the nausea was from that or from the food intake. The doctors decided to keep him another night at this point just so they could make sure.

Tuesday he got to go home! The blockage had broken up enough that the doctors felt comfortable sending him home.  Basically we were told that at this point in time they aren't going to operate unless it gets to the point of an emergency due to the amount of scar tissue that he has from previous surgeries.  For awhile he will be on a soft diet in order to help make sure things are still good, then back to normal, with the hope that this won't happen again anytime soon!

The most frustrating thing about this is that there is essentially nothing that we can do in order to prevent these blockages from happening. As a result of the HHT/JPS Jay-Are doesn't have a large intestine (colon) this means that he has all that extra room for his small intestine to float about, which then can get caught on all the scar tissue that he has from previous surgeries.