Rebuilding the Man

For those of you who didn't know, Ben's back in hospital this week undergoing a hip replacement. I (Paul) will be taking over the reigns, filling you in on how he's progressing for the short period until he gets back. He's been through a lot lately, first receiving the lung transplant and now the hip replacement. In a few short weeks he'll be a totally new man, hence the title - "Rebuilding the Man".

The operation was scheduled in for 9:30am this morning, Thursday 7th September. However, as we're beginning to learn, nothing ever runs on time in hospitals and the operation was further delayed until 11:30am. After already being apprehensive and quite nervous about the operation, I could only imagine how agonising those two hours could have been. None the less it did take place at 11:30am and an hour and a half later Ben was in recovery after an incident free operation.

When I spoke to Janyne last (around 2pm) Ben had just been wheeled into the ward from recovery. He's currently doing well, on 5L of oxygen and about to be hooked up to the humidifier. He'll be on oxygen for a couple of days and most likely they'll have him up and walking in the morning.

Typically, I sent a barrage of questions down the phone line trying to get every piece of detail I could, so here goes. Ben, like every other hip replacement patient, is on oxygen to ease the pressure put on the lungs. It's common procedure and has nothing to do with the fact he has had a lung transplant. The humidifier is used to keep the lungs moist in order to encourage any flem to be brought up, decreasing the risk of infection. As you may of guessed, fighting infection is one of the top priorities given the fact that Ben has a low immune system (a result of the anti-rejection drugs).

Much to Ben's dislike the anesthetist opted for an epidural over the general anesthetic. In short an epidural requires the patient to be awake and semi-conscious during the operation, not a very pleasant thought considering the nature of the procedure. After only having the lung transplant four months ago, Ben's lungs are still quite fragile. A general anesthetic would have required him to be placed on a ventilator however, due to the amount of pressure (10 times that of your normal breath) and his fragile lungs it really wasn't an option.

It turns out the epidural wasn't quite as bad as he thought it would be (he did threaten once that he wasn't going to have the operation unless it was a general anesthetic). They paralyse you throughout the procedure and as a result there was next to no pain and only slight discomfort at times. In recovery he slowly started to regain feeling/movement in his body parts, all except for his toes which are only just coming back to life now.

In short, it all seems to have gone well. I'll keep you filled in as I hear more. To finish I'll leave you with Ben's comment to you all - “It wasn't as bad as what I thought it would be.”

Paul.

P.S. The phrase “It's never as bad as you think it'll be.” has somewhat been Ben's mantra throughout his life. Whilst facing something we were apprehensive about, it always seemed like a nice reassurance that it'd all end okay and usually it did. Nowadays he has changed it slightly with an addition to the end, “Unless it's a double lung transplant, then it's worse”.