Around the start of March, former co-owner Jason Watkins developed two hernias when he tried to help Debbie during a transfer. On the 18th, he went to the hospital for a routine hernia repair. While on the table, omentum around the mesh from his original hernia surgery began bleeding. Over the previous decade, the blood vessels resected into the scar tissue. The surgeon stopped the procedure, suppressed the bleeding, and closed up a massive 9″ long wound on his abdomen without repairing the hernias.

While in recovery, they opted for a platelet and plasma transfusion to boost his numbers. Unfortunately, he had a massive allergic reaction to the plasma, and he went into anaphylaxis, including his blood pressure bottoming out at 60/40. The hospital staff rushed him to the ICU and stabilized him, only for the reaction to persist. They put a PICC line in his neck, flooded his system with medication, and kept him under observation.

On the evening of the 19th, he was moved into a room, and while his pain level was high, he was eating and drinking. However, over the next few days, his incision looked as if someone had shoved a softball underneath the skin, and he was having difficulty with digestion. The drain from the incision also filled up with fluid and needed more frequent emptying. The hospital wanted to discharge him Friday the 21st, but he advocated for one more day because he didn’t feel safe going home.

I stayed with him nearly the entire time, apart from one daily trip home to walk Medjay, shower, and pack more food. That Friday, he told me to go home and rest. He was nauseated when I left, but he maintained it was gas pressure. The plan was to do an X-ray to check his chest and abdomen, but it never came to fruition. If they had, they could have seen his bowels were becoming progressively more distended and putting pressure on the sutures.

Around 7:30 pm, he texted me that he had vomited, and I offered to come back. My rest and recharge time has been limited, and he wanted me to take care of myself since it’s only been in the last few weeks that I feel I’ve turned the corner on the near-death experience of having sepsis in my GI tract. At 2:45 am, a nurse called me from his phone to say the vomiting persisted, and he ruptured sutures and staples. His intestines were now outside his body. Yesterday, I convinced the doctor to let me see the picture (Remember, y’all, computer-integrated surgery is what I went to grad school for!), and dayum! In my head, I kept thinking they had poked through. Nope! To quote him: “I popped like a water balloon and had sausages all over my chest and stomach.”

Ignoring all sense of personal safety and traffic laws, I sped through blackened country roads and saw him before they took him back to surgery. He was intubated with a new PICC line plus an NG tube in his nose. After the original surgery, his intestines were shocked by the handling necessary to curb the bleeding, and they went into “sleep mode.” His gallbladder and liver, meanwhile, kept producing bile to break down the food and beverages he consumed. Without the intestines to process, absorb, and move the byproducts as nature intended, the intestines became progressively more distended. When he was vomiting and coughing, it put too much strain on the system, and pop goes the weasel.

He needed emergency surgery where they “milked” the waste product in his stomach out of the NG tube before putting the intestines back inside and sewing him up. Yes, folks, he eviscerated himself. Fortunately, he came through the surgery with a perfect outcome. They drained two liters of the waste product during surgery and another couple of liters in the following days. He wasn’t allowed to eat or drink anything, and then he graduated to clear liquids. As of the last two days, he is on solid food. He was also released from the ICU into a regular room.

The recovery process has been slow, and he is still in the hospital. When they intubated him, he vomited the waste product and aspirated it into his lungs, which caused pneumonia. He’s gained about 40 pounds of fluid, but copious use of Lasix has reduced the gain by 15 pounds. They also moved the second PICC line in his neck to his arm to prevent infection; however, blood clots formed around the PICC line in the arm after a couple of days. The arm swelled to three times the size of the other, and he needed blood thinners. Slowly but surely, the clots, the pneumonia, and the fluid are trending in the right direction.

His ability to move is improving, and he sits in a recliner a few hours each day. When he needs to reposition in bed, he does it himself, largely unaided by me or the staff, and during PT, he walks around his bed. The trauma and continuous time in the hospital has impacted his mental status, and the doctor thinks he has something called “hospital delirium” because his alertness and responsiveness are much lower than expected. He sleeps a lot, hears things that aren’t there, and has slurred speech. If it persists, I’m insisting on an MRI.

The doctors have not discussed a discharge date yet, and he may transfer to a rehab facility first to continue working on his mobility. It doesn’t help that he still has the original hernias that initiated this hellacious journey. It is not going to be an easy or a short road to recovery, and he will need at least one more surgery. In the meantime, I’ve been keeping him company and working from the hospital. This put blogging on the back burner, but I hope to resume now that the immediate danger has passed.

Keep him in your thoughts, and send positive vibes if you can. It’s been a stressful two weeks, and nowhere near over yet.