Waiting to Expel

I thought that I should update everyone, sorry this didn't come sooner, but I've been busy.

We went to the hospital at 6:00AM on Saturday. Our old neighbor (who is our friend, but we still call "our neighbor") came and picked us up and stayed at the hospital with us the whole time. That was really nice. It was really nice for me to have someone to hang out with while Zach was under the knife. We got to the hospital and checked in. It was basically empty. The hospital just started this Saturday surgery thing and they don't have full staff during that time. We got Zach checked in, they gave him an IV, etc. and then they took him off to surgery. Our neighbor and I hung out in the reception area, visit the ER where he works and just talked about other things as much as possible. I only cried a little bit, so that's pretty awesome. Zach's surgery started at 7:48 AM and the surgeon came out at 8:40 AM to tell me that everything went well. Zach was in Stage 1 Recovery for about an hour and a half. Then they moved him to a floor in the hospital for Stage 2 Recovery. We met him there. When the nurse brought him in she said, "You must be his wife. I've never had a patient who was as concerned about how his wife was doing as Zach. He's a real sweetie." Yeah, I know.

Then we began the process of "waiting for Zach to pee". This is the only requirement that Zach needed to pass in order to go home. They wanted to see him pee. Well, that's not true, they didn't really want to see it, they just wanted to make sure that it happened. I guess this is because they need to make sure that you are not retaining fluids and that everything is working ok. Your body holds onto fluids after a trauma and the anesthesia can do weird things as well, so they take the ability to pee as a serious plus. So I kept pushing Zach to drink water. He was pretty out of it for awhile. He really just wanted to go to sleep for awhile. I told him that if he peed he could sleep at home for as long as he wanted. He finally woke up a bit and drank a bunch of water. Everyone kept asking him if he had to pee. At one point he looked at me and said, "Everyone wants me to pee, but I just don't have to go, I feel bad. I'm trying. Everyone is so obsessed with this." I told him that it was fine, we were just all concerned about his well-being. Finally, we got him walking around and he peed! It was super momentous. I don't think that anyone has been that excited about Zach peeing since he was potty trained. Two nurses, a nursing assistant, our neighbor and I were all really pleased. We kept telling Zach what a great job he did.

They let us go home then and we went home and took it easy. For the past couple days I've just been in "take care of Zach" mode. It's been good. I'm just happy to have him with me. I did decide that we can never have children because I will seriously never sleep. The first night that I brought Zach home I woke up every hour just to make sure he was still breathing. I didn't mean to, I just kept waking up. I'd look over, still breathing, good, good. Then I'd fall back to sleep and then wake up, is he still breathing? Ok, great. Good times.

He seems to be doing really well today. We went for a decently long walk. We've been playing Lego Star Wars II almost 24/7. It's a fun game. We're in Episode VI now. Yeah, that's right, we're bad asses. The only problem is that it makes Zach laugh and that hurts him. His wounds are doing pretty well except that his belly button wound is sort of weepy. I called the hospital and talked to the resident on call. I'm sure that she slept a good solid 45 mins. in the last 3 days, so I'll just trust her opinion. She said that it's most likely fine. Today one of his other wounds looked a little sketchy to me, but my mom said it's likely to be fine. He's not running a fever or anything and it doesn't hurt or smell. I'm really the least helpful person to have watching someone for signs of infection. I'm 99% sure that the pimple near my lip is mouth herpes more often than not, so I really shouldn't be in charge of watching other people for signs of infection. I look at everything and say, "Oh yeah, you've got a disease, you're gonna die." Which isn't really helpful to hear.

Anyway, to recap, Zach's doing well. I'm doing well. I'm definitely not cut out for the nursing profession. In fact, if I didn't love Zach so much, I'd be telling him to get off his ass and get his own glass of water. So basically, I'd make the worst nurse ever. But I do love him, so I'm taking good care of him. He got a a bunch of cards in the mail today and it made him feel really, really special and happy. He said that he "loves being sick". So that's nice.

Hope everyone is doing well. I'll keep you posted.