It’s almost a week since surgery and Alexander is doing very well. As Dr Bruce promised, the swelling would start going down just about as quickly as it came up after Alexander’s surgery.
The past week has been a miracle unto itself. Alexander progressed very quickly after surgery and went through a couple of PICU step-downs until he hit the general neurology floor not very long after his surgery. That’s pretty amazing considering that only a day or two before, his brain was being operated upon! The advances in medical technology are just plain amazing.
Dr Bruce was pleased enough with his progress that he returned home to Nantucket on Friday. He has a flat not too far from Children’s for when he does surgery in Washington but his home is on the island. A word about that…he stayed an extra week in Washington for the purpose of doing Alexander’s surgery. If that doesn’t tell you what kind of a stand-up guy he is, I don’t know what will.
We’ve been awfully pleased with the results of the surgery as well. In the past week, Alexander has been far more alert and awake than he had been for his entire life before the surgery. Come what may, that was one of what has been many miracles since his surgery.
I think it’s safe to say that Dr Bruce and his team have given us our son back to us with a much better prognosis and quality of life than what he had before the surgery. That’s not to say that there aren’t potential problems down the road but for what we wanted to do (stop the seizures), it appears to have been done. The fact that he’s quite alert and half of the seizure medicines have already been discontinued and the phenobarb is being ratcheted down is a very good development.
With that in mind, we were making preparations to get under way today… to the point of singling up all of the lines and turning the screws for a quick cruise in a southwesterly direction.
That is, until Alexander started running a fever!
Having been through one U-turn to the hospital, we weren’t all that keen to do another one. So whilst we get to stay here for them to try to find out what was causing the fevers, Grammy and Nicholas hitched a ride with Gramps for the trip back to North Carolina. At least some of us are going home.
But don’t worry guys, we’ll be on the road behind you before you know it.
