I woke up at almost 7 this morning and was getting ready to go relieve our night shift nurse for Josh (Thank you SO much Tiff) and I got a call about 8:15 saying that they were taking Josh down for emergency surgery and that I would probably not be able to see him before surgery. So my dad rushed me up there. The doctor decided to do emergency surgery because of the increasing pain in Joshs head, his nausea and vomiting, his paralysis on the left side, and his loss of vision. His vision had gotten really bad. The pre-op nurse failed to Dr. Harron before she was done with Josh so I did get to see him and spend a few minutes with him before surgery. His left side was affected so badly he could not feel me touching him on his left arm, leg, foot, face, neck, or ear. When I kissed him as they were rolling him down to the or he didn’t even feel it and make the nurse call me back again to kiss him because he didn’t realize I kissed him before. He couldn’t see me standing beside of him either. They finally got him down to the OR around 10am and got out around 1:!5. They think they got his shoulder fixed while in surgery but there are no incisions so I need to talk to Dr. Miller more about that. The surgery took about the same time as last time but this time they didn’t have to drill his skull again they just had to “pop those rivets out”. Josh is in really good spirits and is in some pain but the pain is nowhere near as bad as before surgery thank god. I’d seen about enough suffering as I could handle! His left side is still not functioning. At times he can move 1 toe and maybe 2 or 3 fingers. He can feel if you touch him, he says it feels funny. SO he doesn’t really realize that he is being touched by a person vs the sheets. The recovery time will be longer and harder than the recovery time for the last brain surgery because of the paralysis he experienced before the surgery this time. The surgeon said he got all of the tumor and he cleaned the area around it out more thoroughly this time so hopefully it wont grow back. He had to scrap Joshs skull to remove tumor matter from it. Part of the tumor was growing into the dura of the brain so he had to remove some of that and he replaced it with dura-bond. This tumor was the same size if not bigger than the last one. This tumor was solid whereas the last one was sort of liquidey.
Josh is in the neuro-trauma icu for now and will likely be there for a few days. Visitors are limited there. He will likely want to sleep of the time for the next few days so visitors will be limited. Today has been a crazy day, if you called and I didn’t answer or call back I’m sorry. Thanks for all the prayers. I will update again tomorrow.
