I am home

Well, I am home. This is the first time I have really been awake all day and I am going to try to quick say alittle while I can.

After 4 1/2 hours spent in a cardiac interventional cath lab suite things looked much worse than had anticipated. The first 2 options were not even possible nor even attempted, so I didn't get poked there as well. He started off doing a veinogram, injecting xray dye into my veins to give him a better look. This is when it was discovered that my clot had progressively gotton worse, and that there were now more clots further up the river in all the smaller veins leading into my liver. He had only one option to make a few incisions directly above my clot on my abdomen and he did get into that portal vein and cleaned out the clot as best as he could. He also discovered more varices that we even beginning to seep blood from them, so he embolized and killed as many of them in there as he could. He could NOT place a stent b/c of the length of damage to my portal vein, it was longer than he thought and by placing a stent it would close off the now necessary other veins feeding my liver (the other onese are blocked with clots now so we cant close off more). The internal intestinal flow has become a huge river and he is happy about that BUT the flow is all going towards my spleen. My spleen is getting bigger and bigger and something must be done about it or all that he has done will not help.

He didn't do anything while in there, but my surgeon and this radiologist will now AGAIN meet with the board of U of M physicians on tuesday, and will AGAIN get the opinion of 20+ surgeons. I like that U of M does this and it assures me that the right thing will be done for me, not just one Doctor thinking that he is the only answer. What does this radiologist think?

He told us that the blood supply going to my spleen has to be cut off, not all of it, just some of it to get that spleen to shrink down! If you cut some of the veins going to it, it won't be getting sooooo much blood supply and hopefully it will shrink to normal. My spleen is functioning fine so taking it out is not the answer he believes.... He also thinks that the "BIG ONE" might have to be done.

He wants to see how my body adapts to all the changes going on inside of it right now, I need to heal, and he did alot more than he thought he would and therefore I am in major pain. We left the hospital as late as we could to see how I would tollerate home pain meds alone and last night I was VERY close to telling steve to take me to the hospital. As long as I can knock myself out I am fine.

I have alot of questions, alot of things don't seem clear to me, I cannot even begin to explain how I feel about having more things done, I have been sedated 7 times in the past 60 days and have been living life out of body......I just get really down sometimes, and when I am in pain, it makes it that much worse. I miss my kids and can't wait to hug them again!