Resting... Sort Of

It's been a long day so far, and it isn't over yet.  Sorry that I went so long getting a follow up post out this afternoon.  The surgery took a lot longer than I remember it taking last time and I didn't want to freak everyone out by saying they were still going.  Sorry if I made some of you nervous.

Tina is now in the EMU and plugged in.  Basically what happened in surgery was that they removed a section of her skull (called a bone flap) and put it in the freezer.  (They put her name and date on it so that when the weekend cleaning crew comes in it doesn't get thrown out with Frank's left over pizza that's been sitting in there for weeks.)  With her skull off, they placed a grid of electrodes right on the surface of her brain.  It's a rectangular piece of plastic with a grid of small metal dots every 1/8 inch or so and each dot is connected to a wire lead.  Once the grid is secured to her brain they feed the wires out of her head and then sew her scalp back up over the wires.  That's pretty much the surgery in a nut shell.

Now that she's in the EMU they hook each of those wire leads up to a computer that can monitor the brain activity coming from the area immediately surrounding the metal dot that it's connected to.  This way the hope is that when she has a seizure they're able to see which metal dot shows the first sign of seizure.  If they are able to determine that her seizures always begin in the same location, the thinking is that they will remove that part of her brain and - presto- no more seizures.  So as odd as this sounds, we need Tina to have seizures in order for them to be able to remove the correct part of her brain, so please pray that she would have seizures... starting tomorrow.

As of right now they still have her on her anti-seizure meds through tomorrow.  They're not sure if they will take her off her meds tomorrow morning or tomorrow night, but this is the same routine from the last time we were here.  They would rather she not have a seizure immediately after surgery if possible.  However, she is hooked up to the computers so if she does have a seizure they should be able to capture it, and since she's on her meds it shouldn't progress into a grand mal, which is always a good thing.

Tina came out of surgery pretty tired as you can imagine, so she's trying to rest but, as anyone who has ever had surgery knows, that's easier said than done.  She has every monitor conceivable hooked up and they're always beeping, inflating, deflating, or printing something, not to mention the doctors and nurses coming in every 15 minutes or so to check on her.  She also says that her head hurts more this time than she remembered it hurting last time.  After they gave her drugs the pain went down considerably, but now she's feeling a bit nauseated.  The bottom line is she's trying to rest but not having a ton of luck.

We received a warm welcome into the EMU.  We haven't seen anyone we don't know, and I got my fair share of hugs when I walked in this afternoon just before they wheeled Tina in.  It is so nice having familiar faces here, and not only that but to have those familiar faces know us personally is so reassuring.  In some ways it feels like we never left.  Seriously - I took a trip down to the cafeteria about 7:00 and grabbed my diner (and lunch) and brought it back up to the room to eat as I've done a million times, and it felt like I just did this yesterday.  Everything from the elevator ride, to walking down the hall with food in my hand, to sitting in the room trying to eat as quietly as I can - it was an odd experience. 

It's 8:00 and Tina appears to be sleeping, but that probably won't last.  The nursing shift change just happened which means a new set of nurses will be coming in to do their checks(and I imagine a few will be stopping in just to say "hi").  The first night after surgery is always a bit more chaotic than the others, at least that was the case with the last four.  It's hard to believe that my wife has had 5 brain surgeries, but hopefully she'll only got one more on the way and that's it.  Six is plenty enough to last a lifetime.