Jonathan is now out of surgery and doing fine in a room at the hospital. The good news is that the surgical team successfully removed the section of his rectum with the tumor and installed the ileostomy. The bad news is that they accidentally nicked a hole in his bladder in the process.

It turns out that the radiation treatment weakened the tissue separating Jonathan’s rectum and bladder. So, it was more fragile than anticipated. The hole has now been stitched up but it means that Jonathan now needs to heal from the bladder injury as well as the LAR surgery and ileostomy.

The initial plan was for Jonathan to have a catheter for only 1-2 days; however, now they want him to have it in for 2 weeks. So he’ll go home with the catheter. He’ll need to come back in a couple of weeks to get his bladder checked before they’ll confirm if it can be removed.

Jonathan is in good spirits about the bladder injury as he recognizes that these things happen sometimes.

During the surgery recovery period, Jonathan experienced a lot of pain in his left calf. He said it felt like the world’s worst charlie horse, or a “charlie demon stallion” to quote Jonathan when he was on a lot of pain meds.

Later in the evening, he developed a fever of 99.9 which caused a bit of concern from the nursing staff. They were worried he might develop sepsis which can be quite dangerous.

Suddenly, Jonathan’s room was full of medical staff running various tests – from an X-ray to blood and urine tests to an EKG. It was all a bit overwhelming and stressful. The staff is monitoring the situation and they gave Jonathan some medicine to help him feel calm.

When I left for the evening, Jonathan was feeling calmer. We are now waiting on the results of the blood and urine samples to see if he has an infection.

Cheers,

Katy