Did I say breathe easy?

Maybe I was too optimistic. Things are not as bright as they seemed.

We had been hanging out for about two hours after the doctors all said, "We'll let you in to visit her in the ICU in about 30 minutes!" Eventually, we got tired of this and stormed the ICU to demand our Barb back.

"Things aren't quite what we thought," an exceptionally informative desk nurse told us. She then brought me and (the six-foot-eight and visibly tense) Dan back to Barb's area to talk to the surgeon.

The whole team was back there; at least six doctors and at least three nurses, including the surgical guys and the ICU guys. The problem, they told us, was that they had given her a lot of fluids over the last ten hours or so, including about two and a half gallons of blood. (I feel a distinct obligation now to donate blood about ten times.) The fluids have built up, causing swelling, especially in her abdomen. Looking at Barbara, the place was clear: right under her ribs, over her diaphragm, she was swollen pretty heavily.

The fear, the doctors told us, was that the excess pressure from that swelling would lay on her lungs and her kidneys. If her kidneys started to suffer, that was bad. If her lungs started to suffer, that was exceptionally bad. They described the fix, the necessity of which they were trying to decide: They would pull out the staples holding the original cut closed, open up her abdomen, and seal it shut with an airtight spongy draining device. It's a device they have a lot of experience with, because they often get soldiers and ground forces casualties in with open abdomen wounds. This device would drain the swelling off, and it would leave her abdomen essentially laid open for a few days until her fluid levels were normal again. (She would absorb the fluid more quickly, of course, except that it has to go through her liver, which is now missing 50% of its mass.)

The downside to that device is that she doesn't get to wake up until the weekend sometime, or maybe Monday. She's already expecting to wake up Thursday night, and the surgeons had already decided to push that to Friday afternoon, so any further postponement really risks throwing off her whole weekend schedule.

The other option, of course, is to leave her swelling. That will either lead to the fluids absorbing normally into her body overnight and into tomorrow morning, letting the problem solve itself, or it will lead to a crisis and decision point in another eight hours or so, when the swelling has increased to the point where the ventilator's function is impaired and she's not breathing the way she ought.

We weren't asked to make this decision. I am grateful for that, although I think I'd be brave enough to go the route where she's less comfortable now, in the hospital for longer, and doesn't run the risk of permanent lung or kidney damage. The doctors are going to observe her for a little while longer, and discuss their options a little while longer, and maybe they'll come talk to us again in a half hour or so.

We each talked to her for a moment before we cleared out of the ICU. I promised her that we were taking care of each other, Daisy was being well watched after, we were all saying prayers and thinking of her, and she should just relax peacefully and focus on feeling well. She was not conscious, in a traditional sense, but it's not at all unlikely that she was listening on some level.

Thanks for the comments y'all are posting. Sorry if I wrote The Brothers Karamazov. I'll keep you current as I can.