Update on Surgery

I'm going to be candid and little detailed here, so if you have a squishy stomach or do not want to hear the details of my horrible experience, you might not want to read ahead. I'm writing to detail my account as best as I can experience it.

It is now Thursday morning (Wednesday night for most of you). My surgery went well. They removed the stone that was lodged in the opening of my bladder from the uterer. The stone was about 2.2 by 4.7 mm. Not huge, but because it was lodged, it was causing some kidney swelling.

After the surgery, the placed a catheter in me. Along with the catheter was a wire that ran through my penis, up the urethra, into the bladder, up the uterer, and into the kidney. You can see the wire above, look closely toward the bottom of the picture. Might be a strange thing to keep, but that wire was not stabilized, so it was constantly moving inside my body irritating it with a pain that was much worse than the stone itself.

When they removed the catheter on Wednesday morning, I began feeling better, but had some constipation problems due to all of the morphine and other pain killers. Also, my urination burned because it was half urine and half blood. This only lasted a few hours though. My back also had severe pain because of the wire that had been inserted had irritated a path all the way to the kidney. About 2:00, they finally gave me some more morphine after I had my first bowel movement in 4 days. I slept for about 2.5 hours which was the longest I had continuously slept in 4 days.

After I awoke, I felt normal for the first time since Friday night. Since then, I have been recovering and have just had some overall body pains and trying to regulate my stomach issues by eating more regularly.

I would like to thank everyone who has emailed or FB me with best wishes and get well comments. It is nice to know you have people thinking about you when you are sick, much less being 8000 miles from home. Luckily, our hospital has been very good and the doctors and nurses have been very helpful.

We are hoping to leave the hospital today or tomorrow and fly back to Shenzhen over the weekend. Our insurance flies us back home, so we have to wait for them to finalize arrangements after hearing from the hospital.