And Now For My Next Trick...
Last night around 9 p.m. I had a CT scan done on my lungs to try to pinpoint exactly why my right lung won't fully expand. I went to bed late last night without an answer.
This morning I decided I was tired of wearing pajama pants... so I put on real pants for the first time since July 21. My dear friend Elizabeth F and her daughters Sarah and Maggie visited... and we still had no answer. This afternoon my incredibly kind Care Assistant Lisa washed, conditioned and combed out my hair-- I was fairly close to having dreadlocks and it was an unbelievable kindness that she spent a half hour bent over the sink dispatching them. Still, no answer.
But tonight, shortly before The Boy arrived for date night, we got our answer.
As it turns out, there isn't fluid in my right lung. Which is to say, it once was fluid... but now that 17 days have passed since the heart transplant, that fluid has become congealed and clotted gunk. And even though last night's late night CT Scan showed that the adorably-named pigtail is actually in the right spot to drain it, it's too viscous to drain that way.
The risk of this gunk becoming infected the longer it stays in my body is high because I'm immunosuppressed. If I weren't immuno-suppressed, they would probably just remove the chest tube altogether and let me leave the hospital in the hopes that my body would absorb the material over the time. But I am immuno-suppressed, like a LOT, so that's not an option.
We can't leave it. We can't get it with a tube. And that leaves one option: lung surgery. It will be done via endoscopy, which is a minimally invasive procedure in which I will go under general anesthesia and they will insert a camera into the pleural space that surrounds my right lung and clean out what they find.
We have to do it fairly quickly because in addition to the risk of infection, there is also the risk that the gunk will become a hardened rind that will require a much more invasive surgery involving scalpels... and if we never remove that rind, there is a likelihood that I'll never fully expand my right lung again. (There is a risk this "rind" has already happened, in which case they will abandon the endoscopy and go in with scalpels and do things the old-fashioned way. That would be a bummer, but it's a possibility. More pain after, longer recovery.)
Surgery is this Thursday afternoon.
So we got our answer. And then we ordered pizza from Pagliacci and watched "A Quiet Place." They brought an easy chair into the room so D could sit very close to my hospital bed and we just chowed down and watched the movie on my laptop while I had good hair, cleanish skin and was wearing normal pants, and things felt almost normal.
Because there is a strange thing that happens with long-term chronic illness. It starts to make sense that you are in the hospital, that you are once again to be wheeled away from your loved ones toward an uncertain fate, that someone will be counting you backwards into oblivion while a team stands by, ready to cut into your smooth and unmarred skin with their gleaming instruments. I'm sure it's part of how our brains protect us-- and it's a mercy. It's also why I'm not very frightened of this surgery.
I've come too far. I've lived through too much. And I really do have a lot of things to live for now that I have a fully functional heart. And you guys, I have so many more songs to sing! If you've ever heard me really belt the way I love to belt, you know I need both lungs at full capacity.
I think they will probably leave the pigtail in place until the surgery because it's likely the entry point they will use for the camera. So yeah, I still have that going for me although it's been far more manageable since we upped the frequency of my pain meds.
Some good news did come in during all of this-- I got the results of my second biopsy (which also took place yesterday) and I am at rejection level 1R, which basically means no rejection (it's a 0 to 5 scale).
Recovery will likely only be a few days and I will be home with The Boy and my fur babies by early next week. In the meantime, it's pretty boring around here and I'd love to see some friendly faces... so let me know if you want to come visit and I will put you on the calendar!