Surgery

As most of you know Nate had surgery about two weeks ago. What most of you don't know is that along with fixing his diaphragm they also extracted his soul, which took several days to return. After the surgery Nate was a zombie, which is great for zombie lovers. Annie is not a zombie lover. Occasionally he would open his eyes and stare. Annie and I would smile at him and try to get his attention but he would just stare blankly. It was very unnerving.


You can't see his surgery cuts but you can see the chest tube. For those of you who don't know, chest tubes were created by Satan with the specific purpose of killing happiness. Nate had to have this in him for days and it was painful and very uncomfortable. He didn't have a good sleep nor could he be off of morphine until they took this out. The tube went into his lung lining and pumped out air and fluids that were caught in there. It was miserable.


He was doped up and for the first hour so when they brought him out of surgery. He looked as you see in the picture except he had a breathing tune in his mouth. The breathing tube was supposed to be extracted by a doctor or nurse when he started to wake up. You think in the intensive care unit there would have been a doctor or nurse around. There wasn't so as Nate started waking up he started to gag on the thing and yanked it out himself. A wonderful bit of defiance that I was happy to see.

All of the wires and tubes are either in him or connected to him in some way. He struggled and whined as the anesthesia war off. The only way we could calm him down and keep him from ripping things out was by lashing his hands to the bed. I didn't like that so I held him and he calmed down and fell back asleep. It was a very sad moment.

After days of problem after problem Nate finally began to stabilize and he came out of the stupor. He wasn't completely back to normal but it was a huge difference and we were happy. That is until they told us the surgery might not have worked and his breathing still had problems because his lungs were crushed. It took another 5 days to work that out.