The gall.

Tuesday was the day we'd been eagerly awaiting: Jonathan's laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Ever since we got the call in November that they finally saw some tiny gallstones on his CT scan, we were just waiting for his body to be in fighting form for the gall bladder removal. The docs think that tiny gall stones and sludge were what blocked the duct, causing his pancreatitis (the gall bladder drainage duct and the main pancreatic drainage duct are right beside each other, so if the gall bladder duct is blocked it can get so inflamed that it also blocks off the pancreatic duct). 

No one was happier than Jonathan pre-surgery. They were also removing his JP drain, meaning that he would not be stinky (it leaked through the hole in his skin) and he could finally shower properly. Oh, and not walk around with a little grenade full of pus pinned to belt loop all the time. Just a bit of a quality of life issue. 

Hanging out in the swank Duke Medicine Pavilion pre-op waiting area.

Not a TV in sight! Heaven. 

The fancy-pants new medicine pavilion is super nice. They give visitors a little pager (like the ones you get when you're waiting for a table at a restaurant, not like the ones you used to deal drugs in the early '90s) and it lights up and buzzes at various time points. And they're really up front with the whole process. Right when you check in, they explain that the pager will beep four times:

1. When it's time for the patient to go back for all the pre-op stuff. (For Jonathan, this included the standard "get naked and put on this nice gown," "I'm gonna put a 20-gauge IV all up in your hand veins, but here I'll jab you with lidocane first," and the new but fun, "Now let's shave all the hair off your belly.")

2. When visitors are allowed back to give hugs and kisses before the operation. Visitors can't be there for the pre-op fun times mentioned above, but once Jonathan was all ready to go, they buzzed me back.

Don't be alarmed, but Dr. Blazer was super late showing up for this surgery. So Jonathan spent longer than normal in the pre-op waiting phase. Here he was playing with the monitors by holding his breath and breathing fast/slow to make designs on the monitor screen. 

 3. When surgery has started. Once the doc showed up to do the surgery, I said goodbye and headed back out to the waiting area. They buzzed at about 1:20 to let me know that surgery had officially begun.

4. When surgery is finished. At about 2:20, right when I was getting all relaxed and settling in for what I thought was a three-hour procedure, I got buzzed again and there was Dr. Blazer standing by the consultation room. I was pretty freaked out, thinking something had gone wrong. But no, surgery was done and everything went well! I got to go back and see the sleepyhead firsthand.

Jonathan sans gall bladder and JP drain.

 Pretty cool! He had a great post-op nurse, Drew, who monitored him for two hours until it was time to move on up to the North Tower. It's a bummer moving from the swank digs of the Medicine Pavilion to the old North Tower. Especially when you discover that you're staying on a "Short Stay Unit" which is the smallest "room" ever. It's like one big room that's kinda divided into little bays for each bed. Jonathan's bed took up almost the whole place. Tiny.

Tiny little Short Stay "room"

There was a little chair there, but it didn't convert to a bed, so I was not going to stay the night. And, sad for Jonathan, no Food Network. He wanted to watch Food Network while in the hospital. But he was just there for monitoring, and he did just fine. I came back to the hospital around 5 AM on Wednesday so I could make sure to be there for morning rounds. We saw a couple of surgical residents early that morning who said all looked good, and Jonathan was discharged around 10:30 AM.

Now he's home, taking some pain medication and resting. He has four tiny incisions on his abdomen from where the instruments were inserted, and they're just closed with surgical glue. The only place he even has a bandage is on his side where they pulled the JP drain. He's had some soreness and some intense shoulder pain, which is apparently pretty common after laparoscopic abdominal procedures. It's because they inflate your abdomen with carbon dioxide to give them space to move and see during the surgery, and then the gas is trapped in your abdomen and it moves up to your shoulders whenever you're upright, and gets trapped in the muscles. The nurses said there's not much to be done about it - the gas just has to absorb. But otherwise he's doing well. Eating and sleeping and all that. He can't lift anything over 5 lb. for at least three weeks, which makes life interesting in the parenting department... but we can live for three weeks.