Ontopic my wifes life

DoubleJ

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Oct 30, 2008
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Shelton, WA
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Well, i've been home 2 days now after 5 days in the hospital while my wife recovered from brain surgery. She had what is called a chiarri one malformation. Google it if you wish but basically it means the shelf above the spinal column that holds the back of the brain in place has deteriorated amd her brain was slipping down her spinal column. They went in and closed the spinal column hole, pushed her brain back where it was supposed to be, and rebuilt the shelf.

So, in the past 3 years, she's had this, a laminectomy to remove 2 slopped disks in her low back, 3 surgeries on a lis franc separation in her foot where ligaments and tendons tore completly off the bone along with 7 fractures and 3 dislocations, a surgery to fuse most of that foot together, tumor removal for breast cancer, and she's due for a hysterectomy in sept and needs to get another laminectomy on 2 disks in her neck. All by the ripe old age of 33

This is the same woman you all helped be able to walk the breast cancer 3 day a few years ago. Needless to say, she probably won't be doing that ever again.

Here's my wifes arm after the anesthisiologist in training got done with her. Granted, she's a hard stick anyway and her arm has looked worse worse after much more experienced techs have put in an iv but, knowing this, why would you put a trainee on her?
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Here's the after effect of her surgery. Basically, her brain was slipping down a hole where her spinal column is. They had to push her brain back in, construct a floor plate that was supposed to be there but wasn't, and closed up the hole so the brain could't go down any further
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I had to walk about 6 blocks to the downtown seattle group health to pic up her meds for home. Downtown seattle is a trip. I was wearing a washington huskies hoodie and costco jeans. I was apparently dressed too "poor" because i got many dirty looks and nobody would sit next to me at group health preferring to stand. I laughed because when i left i had in my pocket about $5000 street value worth of pills these idiots would have paid out of their ass for to feed their pill addiction. I also laughed when mall security (yes, downtown seattles group health is in a mall) stopped me to check my ccw licence because i was printing a bit. The looks on the rich peoples faces when the security guard said "have a nice day" was priceless. Granted, thisnwas justbdays after that guy shotnup that deli but, should have been all the more reason to expect people to carry a pistol. Not in seattle I guess. Btw, that massacre happened thenday of my wifes surgery and in a deli I was planning on eating at at some point. On some levels, I'm glad I wasn't there but, on some levels I'd like to think that I might have been able to do something. Here's some pics.

Heres a nice water feature at the entranc e to group health. LAST I CHECKED, IT WAS A DR.'S OFFICE AND NOT A DAMNED MUSEUM. now i know where my co-pays
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Here's a douche that was sitting in the waiting room
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Here's a close up of his $30 socks and $400 peter pan shoes
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Come to think of it, this guy was probably WaW's gay shopping buddy.

I had to pee. After looking for 20 minutes, i found it, as well as this
IMAG0028.jpg

seriously? WTF?
 
Also, Jesus fuck. Sorry to hear about your wife's horribly scary and disgusting condition. It sounds like things got taken care of, but now I feel like I need to go check for holes in my brain pan.
 
Ugh. I know what she's going through with that surgery. I hope she is able to heal quickly. The first week sucks, after that it's pretty gravy.

That's a lot of work she's had to have done by 33. Yikes.
 
Ugh. I know what she's going through with that surgery. I hope she is able to heal quickly. The first week sucks, after that it's pretty gravy.

That's a lot of work she's had to have done by 33. Yikes.

We're at day 7 now. It's a bit better. Pain level is a constant 5 with spikes to 7 as opposed to 7 with spikes to 9. Getting out of the hospital and home where i can care for her properly has helped. She litterally went 2 of her 5 nights there with no meds almost all night. Nurses there sucked. She used to be a nurse and knows what care is supposed to be like. A lot of that hospitals nurses are being reported to the state. The care was rediculous.

Did you have this surgery done or was it something else?
 
Holy crap man. What a roller coaster. I really appreciate you peppering this thread with humorous douchebags, it made me want to cry less. Peter Pan shoes ftw.

Godspeed my friend. :hs:
 
I think we're going to need a documented life threatening illness for admission to this forum soon. :D

my thoughts are with you. <3
 
We're at day 7 now. It's a bit better. Pain level is a constant 5 with spikes to 7 as opposed to 7 with spikes to 9. Getting out of the hospital and home where i can care for her properly has helped. She litterally went 2 of her 5 nights there with no meds almost all night. Nurses there sucked. She used to be a nurse and knows what care is supposed to be like. A lot of that hospitals nurses are being reported to the state. The care was rediculous.

Did you have this surgery done or was it something else?

Duke had a brain tumor and has a similar scar like your wife.
 
We're at day 7 now. It's a bit better. Pain level is a constant 5 with spikes to 7 as opposed to 7 with spikes to 9. Getting out of the hospital and home where i can care for her properly has helped. She litterally went 2 of her 5 nights there with no meds almost all night. Nurses there sucked. She used to be a nurse and knows what care is supposed to be like. A lot of that hospitals nurses are being reported to the state. The care was rediculous.

Did you have this surgery done or was it something else?

Not the same thing, but the scar is pretty much the same, except they used staples to close me up. Jerks. Sutures are better at leaving less of a scar. I actually chose to go the first 2 days without meds because they made me violently ill. I was home about 4 days after they cut, and was off meds about a week and a half after that.
 
Not the same thing, but the scar is pretty much the same, except they used staples to close me up. Jerks. Sutures are better at leaving less of a scar. I actually chose to go the first 2 days without meds because they made me violently ill. I was home about 4 days after they cut, and was off meds about a week and a half after that.

lightweight. I rocked the hospital bed for 9 days. get your faux illness out of my face. :D
 
That's a lot for such a short period of time. Sorry to hear it. I was checked for chiari malformation once. It can cause a huge amount of problems. Maybe now her neck issues will be a little better? Not all people can, but I managed to avoid surgery for a slipped disk by doing some pretty rigorous physical therapy for like 6 months. Anyway, sounds like your family is having quite a rough time. I hope things turn around soon. Hang in there.
 
btw, what is her prognosis? Quality of life?

The hysterectomy is what it is. The breast cancer shouldn't come back but, it's cancer so, who knows. The neck and back will cause pain and stiffness forever. they are herniated disks after all.

The foot has 3 more surgeries left, at least. next surgery should be January-ish, to remove the 6 screws currently in there holding the fusion together. Next surgery will be to fuse the ankle which has since collapsed because of the failed structure of the rest of the foot. The surgery following that will be to remove those screws. She will walk with a limp or a cane forever, if she doesn't decide to have it cut off before then. She says the pain in her foot is a constant 5 out of 10. The Dr. says that's actually better than he expected and that she is in the "honeymoon period" where it is as good as it will ever be and that she should expect the pain and problems to increase as the years go by. I've spent a fair amount of time on forums and webpages researching Lis Franc fractures and time after time after time I keep seeing people with this injury, most to a lesser degree than my wife, get surgery after surgery and fight and deal with the pain for 5 or 6 years before they just can't take it anymore and opt to have the foot amputated. Seems like this happens in over half of these type of injuries. I've seen her, after a trip to the beach or an all day shopping trip, be in so much pain that night and the following few days that I'm surprised she hasn't opted for it yet. I will say I suggested it right after it happened and her answer was a flat hell no. Well, I will say I think she is about 40% of the way to getting it done at this point.

The Chiarri surgery she just had is still way up in the air. She basically self diagnosed this because the doctors we saw had never seen anything like it. It started about Nov 2011. She started to forget things. This was odd because my wife remembers things an elephant forgets. She also started having a tremor in her hands. she cut herself a few times cooking because she couldn't hold her knife steady. She started having vision problems and started slurring her words. She also started dropping things mid sentence. She would be in the middle of the story and forget completely what she was talking about.

Scary shit for sure. We were sure it was a tumor, that the breast cancer spread to her brain. At best, we though it might be MS. It's a hell of a position to be in when you're HOPE for MS. Well, she had an MRI done and it showed no tumor or MS spots. It did show that the brain was sliding down her spinal column though. When we took the MRI from February 2012 and compared it to the MRI on her neck from Oct. 2010, it showed that the brain had slipped 10mm. 8mm is considered moderate to severe. What really concerned the neurosurgeon was that, in most cases, the brain slips over a lifetime. In Oct. 2010, the brain was in place. It slipped 10mm in just over a year. Not a good thing.

Prognosis for this is going to be fluid. There's no way to tell if the surgery succeeded in fixing the symptoms without having time to experience life afterwards. If, in a couple of years, she can look back on the time and say that the tremors stopped, her memory returned, vision problems subsided, etc. we can call it a success. If not, all of this was for nothing. Physical recovery for this surgery, due to what was done, is expected to be 4-6 months before the area is healed physically. The problem isn't just the cutting of the neck muscles but involves moving of the brain, reconstruction of the shelf, work done on the spinal column to include shaving of C1 to make room for the new shelf.
 
Well, instead of starting a new thread i'll just add to this one. Right now i'm sitting at virginia mason, again. We're back because the doctors think she may be leaking spinal fluid through a hole that didn't seal up correctly. Waiting to hear. May be another surgery. Will keep you all posted.