We've had a rough time since last time I posted. The original pull-thru surgery on the 17th went well, although Landon ended up losing 2/3 of his colon. He only has about a foot left. What is left of his colon looks very different than a typical person's, which looks like an upside down horse-shoe. He only has one side of that horse-shoe like shape left, and so it goes slightly up and the remainder is stretched to his rectum. His bowel function returned earlier than expected and everything related to the surgery itself went super smoothly.
Unfortunately, we ran into some complications. The first complication was respiratory- both of his lungs partially collapsed at the bottoms. No big deal, though, they started having respiratory therapy come and work with him 4x per day and it improved almost immediately. Within a few days it was resolved.
The second, and biggest complication, was that he spiked a high fever on day 2 post-op (Nov. 19th.) They started him on a broad-spectrum antibiotic after they took cultures. Cultures all came back fine, although it was clear Landon wasn't recovering like he should be. He continued on antibiotics but stayed sick with little to no improvement. They ordered a CT scan with contrast, which showed that he had a large abdominal abscess. We thought this was great news to find out the source of the problem, and it sounded like a simple solution- they wanted to go in the next morning and surgically place a drain to drain the abscess. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. Once they got in there, it was multiple abscesses close together, rather than a single abscess. The interventional radiologist placed the drain in the largest one, but didn't sound like he had high hopes of it working. And it didn't..
Three days after the drain was placed, it was clear that Landon was taking a rapid downward spiral. He was up screaming "oww" all night long, which should not have been the case 11 days post-op. They had to order Oxycodone for his pain, meanwhile his fever spiked to above 103 and his heartrate was staying in the 190s. He started looking very sick late Friday night (the 28th) and ended up going back into emergency surgery to re-open the abdomen, remove abscesses, and flush out the abdominal cavity. Emergency surgery was a little scary, but he got through it okay. Before he went back, we signed consent for an ileostomy to be placed, should it need to be. If the colon was injured or became injured while removing the abscesses, he would have had to have an ileostomy to give what's left of his colon time to heal. Fortunately, he had a successful surgery, although it ended up being the largest incision that he has had to have for a surgery so far.
We are almost 48 hours past the end of his emergency surgery Friday night. He seems to be recovering well, and his bowel function is already back again. He gets to drink tomorrow, and if all goes well, eat on Tuesday. We are hoping and praying that he heals and fully recovers as smoothly as possible, now that our one planned surgery turned into 3 within 2 weeks.
Please keep Landon in your thoughts and prayers! Like I mentioned before, the actual pull-thru surgery looks very promising so far. We are anxious to see how things go over the next few months, and if and when the Botox that was done along with the surgery wears off, if it makes a big difference and needs to be re-done. We are still in the hospital, starting week 3. We're hoping to get out of here by the end of the week if things keep moving in the right direction. I will update soon on how things go.
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