packing a wound, not packing heat

For the non-medical or squeamish person, this may become icky. It is not my intention to gross you out.I'm just talking about what's going on. My son who is 24 was recently diagnosed with testicular cancer. He had surgery on May 1st through the groin. The incision was about 6 inches long, on the right side. About 10 days later one of the dogs jumped up on him, and I think that caused an internal bruising or bleeding to start. Four days after that, he complained to me about how much pain he was having, and being skeptical I wanted to take a look. What I saw was a hard red area surrounding the incision to the degree that I felt the only thing to do was to apply heat to get something to drain out. I told him if it wasn't better by Monday we would call the doctor, but I felt we would be calling before then. Within a few hours the wound was draining copious amounts of thick and thin old bloody drainage. We called the urology resident on call and within 30 minutes we were on our way back to the hospital. He was seen in the emergency room where the resident opened the wound and drained the corruption out, then packed the wound with wet dressings. They admitted him and started IV antibiotics and pain medicine. He was there 4 days. Then he came home. Now I am changing the dressing and packing the wound each morning. It it terribly painful for him to go through. I am a nurse so it is not physically hard for me to do the job. It is difficult to perform the duty while making him moan and cry. He wants me to go as fast as possible. I don't want to go too fast so that I get the wound nicely filled with the wet gauze. But if I go too slow it is like I am torturing him. So each time we go through it, it is a hair-raising ordeal for us both. The wound is healing but not as fast as it needs to to keep his next surgery on schedule. The head of the program called him this week to check on him and to see when he was coming back for a check up and to tell him they might have to postpone his surgery a week to let the wound heal more. You don't want him to have surgery with an active infection or an open wound but you don't want to give the aggressive tumor another week to crop up somewhere new while we are waiting. So we try not to worry too much and keep on going day to day.

a bump in the road

The boy and his dad have just returned from another hospital stay at LSU Shreveport. Seems the boy got a localized hematoma / infection that caused his incision to open and begin pouring old icky blood out. We trucked on up to LSU after speaking to the urology resident on call. What a nice guy. He waited for us to get there and got to work on him then. He spent 3 nights there. It looks a lot better, Now mama the nurse gets to do dressing changes every morning till be go back next week. Hopefully he will be healed enough to go ahead with the next surgery during the first week of June. Sheesh.

absent other grandmother

Something is going on with other grandmother. On mother's day weekend I am told she chose to be away from her home when grandbaby's mama had the kids at her house. Mine is supposed to be there with supervised visitation. Other grandfather was there, in and out. So I guess that counts. Now this weekend, first the mama was just coming on Sunday and was just coming to our house in preparation for the girl's pre-k graduation. Last night she calls to say she is coming in at noon today and wants to pick the girl up. I say ok. She talks to the girl all about it, makes her happy, gets her excited, then tells me other grandmother won't be there again and other grandfather will be out of town with a ball tournament. I told her we would talk about it later.
That I didn't understand why her mother would do that when she knows it's supposed to be supervised visitation only. If I say no, I look like the bad guy to the girl, not letting her stay with her mother since her mother already told her she was coming,etc. That is not right, I feel like they are playing me. If I say yes, then I am going against what the lawyer and the psychologist have said. This is the second time it has happened. I think I will tell her it can't happen again or there will be no more visits until the issue can be straightened out. At the same time, I need them to help out with child care during the girl's dad's surgery and hospital time that is fast approaching. I wonder what other grandmother thinks she is doing? getting a well deserved break from extra duties or making her daughter take care of her own kids for a change, or what. WHAT.

my husband lost his job

My husband was told today that he will not have a job at his current school in the fall. Seems his school will have 6 teachers too many in the fall with the projected enrollment. He is a magnet teacher and this is the last year of the magnet grant. He does not teach a core subject. So he got cut. Great. He is in his last year of drop. One year to go to real retirement. It is possible that only a desperate principal will want to hire him because he will only be at the new school one year. On the other hand, it is possible that someone who knows him will jump at the chance to have him on staff. I hope the latter is true. He is a good teacher, and a good person to have on staff. He says he was not surprised that it happened. He says his principal said he would rather have walked on broken glass than to have told him the news. So now he has to start talking to principals to see if there are any openings at their schools at the same time that he packs up his belongings and down loads everything off his school take home computer onto a hard drive, and helps his son get ready for surgery and gets ready for a garage sale. The motto at his current school is Impossible is Nothing. I guess they are right.

supervised visitation

Why would a mother, who knows that her daughter must have supervised visitation to see her children, elect to go away for the weekend that the daughter is coming to town, which happens to be mother's day weekend. Does she need a weekend away with her sisters so badly that she leaves her spouse, who is not a bad guy at all with the responsibility of supervising the visitation? Or Does she now think that her daughter is doing so well in recovery that she no longer needs the supervision required by the custodial (grand)parents? Makes you want to go hmmmmm.

Good News Bad News

My husband and I accompanied our 24 year old son to his post operative visit to hear the report and treatment plan. It was not exactly what we expected. It seems that his testicular cancer is aggressive and needs further treatment. He needs further surgery, and major surgery at that. The pathology report from that surgery will determine if chemotherapy is necessary. There is some good news. The tumor is not mixed, which can complicate treatment. It is a single tumor, just a nasty one. The pathology from the first surgery showed containment within the testicle and micro-invasion in the blood vessels leading from the testicle. There is no evidence of tumor any where else in the body. WHen Lance Armstrong was diagnosed he had it in his brain and lung and liver. So believe me it could be worse. We are ok, just scared for our son and what he is facing and what he is going through. He has had a hell of life with mental health problems and alcohol and drug abuse out the whazoo. He has just recently gotten a little better outlook and cleaned up. God Bless him. We love him.

The past predicts the future

The girl's momma has a bad habit and history if you will of picking boy friends that are losers. I can not say what number she is on since the breakup of my son and her. Some of them have been very short, others have been longer. She has currently been involved with a young man for ?a few weeks? Nice polite courteous when we met him. Open about his past when I discussed it with him just recently. The past is not good at all, Just out of prison in Feb for drug related gun and robbery charge after serving 5 years. He says he wants to turn his life around. Has a new job to start on Monday. HOWEVER, I tried to tell her that it was too soon to get involved with someone since she was still in recovery and that if her facility had encouraged the relationship, I thought they were off base. He did advise her not to move into the rent subsidized apartment she had found, and did find her a nice little house to rent in a neighborhood, but he also was invited in, as to live there. Way too soon in the relationship, but true to form. He was helping with finances and did not have a vehicle so it was helping on both sides.
ADDENDUM: It seems that boy friend came home high - she said on weed- but it didn't matter what it was, that he wasn't coming in and she wasn't having anything more to do with him, that she could not put him or his actions ahead of her recovery and her children. It seems he left and got drunk and went to a friend or relative's house (I can't keep up) and "messed with" a 12 year old girl. I don't know how much messing with was done, but he is now in jail. His grandmother came to B's house and supposedly told her that if she had let him come home, he wouldn't have gotten in trouble, so of course the whole family is screwed up.
The point being that it is too soon for her to make these kind of decisions and she is making the wrong decisions when it comes to men, and she brings them into her house to live too soon. This is not good for her and certainly not good for her children. Now the next time she sees her daughter, she will have to come up with some excuse as to why he is gone.