Painful night, but looking good this morning

"The Turban" is on the left. It's now gone, however, which is a good sign.

We're all up here this morning, and have talked with the surgeon. The surgeon is precise in everything he does, including showing up at exactly 8:00AM as he said he would. Dad had a pretty pain-filled night (ranking his pain at "35" on a 1-10 scale), but had plenty of percocet and morphine to try and take the edge off.

I did get a call at 3:45AM (which scared me when I saw that call coming in thinking that the hospital doesn't call you in the middle of the night for good news). Physically and neurologically he was doing just fine, but he was in a lot of pain and insisted on calling me. He was telling me to assure the nurse that he was right in asking to page the anesthesiologist to have him put to sleep so he could get out of pain and to sleep. I convinced him that was not the the thing to do, and that I'd talk to him until the morphine kicked in. That lasted about 30 minutes, and he drifted back to sleep around 4:20AM. Not the same could be said for me, when I finally went back to sleep a bit after 5AM.

We got up here and the turban is off (so a picture from my iPhone from last night will have to suffice - not quite the quality from my good camera), and he had the drain taken out. He will likely move to the step-down unit for a couple of days to kind of get his bearings and still be watched pretty closely. We won't know pathology results for a couple of days, but we could be coming home Sunday or Monday back to Omaha.

The surgeon said this morning that all looked good, his incision was "healthy," and that what they took out yesterday would help prevent the swelling from causing more problems, but wouldn't necessarily improve things a whole lot. But we will know more as the week progresses. Hard to believe that some good won't come from the pressure being taken off. Too early to say. Next steps in treatment will be decided once pathology is back.

Time for breakfast here at one of the largest hospitals in the world. Found out last night from the night nurse there are 130 adult ICU beds in this hospital alone. That's just amazing to me. Huge place with very specialized care in volume. Glad we're here.