My Journey

I'm cross I didn't post this last night but I fell asleep on the lounge - with the 2 little cyclones and when I woke up at about 10pm and put them to bed I was only good for falling into bed myself.

So, my Dad survived the op (whooo hooo) and a mere 24 hours after he has already been moved out of I.C.U. and into a ward where I here he has been back-chatting the nurses. That's my Dad :)

Thank you all so very much for your good thoughts. I truly believe in the power of good thought and I appreciate the time you took to pass some his way.

Now onto the gory bits. 18 months ago (or there-abouts) they found a tumour in Dad's colon. It was small, completely encapsulated, and needed no chemo after removal. It was a clean operation but as they needed to do a by-pass for the bowel (into a bag) it was never-the-less a tricky one. When they sent him home he became very ill as the fitting for the by-pass was not sealed and waste was leaking into his stomach. This caused him to nearly die and he ended up staying in hospital an extra 4 weeks and losing 25kgs. NOT a good way to do it.

Anyway move forward 18 months and they find another tumour. The plus side to having a bag is you can see instantly if there is something wrong. Dad saw some blood and went straight to the Dr. The tumour, again, was small and apparently fully encapsulated. However this operation was different to the last. Instead of just removing the tumour (which was the size of a pea) they removed the colon, half his lower intestines and then sewed the lot up.

That's going to hurt for a while.

But he is alive, he can still play with and talk to his grandchildren. He can still heap shit on me (which is our normal way of showing how much we love each other). And he is happy about that. I am not sure how he will deal with the mental side of things after his body has healed but knowing him he will be cracking jokes about it in a few short weeks.

This is why I had been a bit quiet this last month. I thought it so unfair after what he and my Mum have already been through and I started feeling sorry for myself as I am not ready to be an orphan yet. Then I realised that not taking care of myself, not eating properly was just setting up my children to have the same problem with me in years to come, and that is what made me take myself to task and start doing healthy things again.

And, to be fair to me, Mark has been working in Melbourne during the week for the past 4 weeks so weekdays have been very hectic for me and when the weekends came around the last thing I wanted to do was sit in the study and 'compute'...

OK. I better finish this before someone walks behind me and wanders what I am up to :D
Have a wonderful day.

Posted by Margaret on Thursday, October 12, 2006 at 8:22:00 am | Permalink