Update on Hubby...

Thank you all for your prayers and thoughts for Hubby, they were greatly appreciated!

Today has been a week since surgery and he is doing very well. He had an appointment yesterday with the eye surgeon and he is healing very well. He has healed to the point that most don't reach until about 3 weeks after surgery. He still has some bruising and swelling, but his double vision didn't return like they thought it would. They pull out the bottom eyelid and go through there to put in the plate, so he has no stitches on the outside. He also had to have the titanium plate instead of the plastic because there was too much bone missing. He'll go back to the Doctor in a month and he should be healed enough that he can go get an eye exam to replace his glasses. The left lens of his glasses was scratched.

He also had a cardiologist appointment yesterday. He's had an Echo gram, nuclear stress test and a heart catheterization (no blockages) done over the last six months. His heart has gotten a little weaker since he had a heart attack in July of 2007. He gets extra beats sometimes, not sure how often, he doesn't feel them and they don't always show up on tests. They showed up this time on his EKG during his annual visit to the heart doctor, but not on any of the other tests. They're just kind of random. They don't last long (just a few seconds), but there is a slight chance, if your heart is weaker, that the extra beats could get it out of rhythm and it not be able to correct the rhythm. So they tweaked his meds and they are going to do another Echo gram. If his heart has gotten stronger they will watch it for now, but if it's the same they want to put in an ICD as an 'insurance policy' in case it ever gets out of rhythm. They could do more adjusting with his meds but that would make his blood pressure to low. Because even though he has had a heart attack, he didn't and doesn't have high blood pressure (strange I know...ha). Once you have a heart attack they give you meds to keep it lower than what is usually considered normal, in his case anyway. So we are hoping the meds they tweaked have helped strengthen it.

 This is what hubby found on his white board at work after his fall.

He got a rose yesterday from the eye surgeon.

Thanks again for the prayers,

Sheila

Ouch!

Now for the rest of the story... My husband had a business trip to Chicago on Monday the 19th. Freezing temps and snow was the forecast for the days he was there. Monday night they went out to dinner. To get to the restaurant you went up an outside escalator. They found, after dinner, that the down escalator wasn't working so they had to walk down. Hubby made it about 3 steps before he slipped and fell to the bottom. His right shoulder, arm and leg had some scrapes and bruises, but his worst injury was his left eye.

He was returning home on Wednesday the 21st, so I called the Doctor's office to make him an appointment to get checked out. They wanted him to go get a CT scan of his face because he was having double vision. I took him there, and after waiting quite awhile for them to read the results, they finally sent us home and told us they would call with the results. Around 9pm the doctor called and wanted him to go to the emergency room, which was useless as there was nothing they could do but give him pain meds. His diagnosis, Orbital floor (blowout) fracture. You can look it up, but basically he blew out the bone that supports under the eye.

His doctor set up an appointment with the eye surgeon. The surgeon checked him out and found a small tear in the retina, he sent him home with an antibiotic and scheduled him with a retina specialist. So the next day was spent at the retina specialist. He repaired the tear with a laser. It appeared to him to be an older tear, not related to the fall. Hubby had a lot of pain later after having all that done and couldn't get comfortable. He would go back and forth between the bed and the chair in the living room, trying to sleep but he couldn't. He decided to try a benadryl to see if it would help him sleep.

Needless to say about 45 minutes later we were headed to the ER for anaphylactic shock. Last March this happened and the allergist found nothing, but he had taken Rite @id brand dye-free children's allergy, which has diphenhydramine (benadryl) in it. But the allergist thought maybe it was the preservative in it. This time it was the regular little pink benadryl, that he had taken just fine a few months before his attack last March. I checked inactive ingredients for both to see if anything was similar but there wasn't. So unless something else happens we are assuming he is allergic to diphenhydramine. I guess the bright side to all that was by the time we left the ER his face pain was gone.

 So now after the swelling, double vision and most of the bruising has went down, he is scheduled for surgery tomorrow, the 13th. Then he will probably have to go through more swelling, bruising and double vision again for a little while.

Picture he sent the morning after he fell.

Picture I took a few days later

One I took the first of Feb. I'll probably take another today. He still has a little bit on that darkest area on the bottom.

I'd like to ask for your prayers for him as he has his surgery tomorrow.

Thank you,

Sheila