Tandy Update - Wednesday PM

Post by Monique (typed up at 35, 000 feet)

Finally a day where we got some answers, not necessarily the ones we wanted to hear but still a small amount of hope. This morning, as scheduled, Tandy underwent another surgery to change the dressing on her abdomen wound. The surgeon as usual, did a great job, he removed one of the drains, and told us not to get our hopes up, but to him, the liver was a little smaller and the color of the liver was somewhat better. Later on, we had a meeting with the intensivist and the GI doctor. First, the intensivist told us about her lungs, and the fact that he was concerned about being on a respirator for that long because it is a perfect source of germs and infections but for the time being, her lungs seemed to be ok. He then told us he was quite concerned about the fact that her kidneys were not working as well as they had been and if that continued, she might be in trouble because she was too sick to be put on dialysis. Then, of course, he was extremely concerned about her liver. The GI doctor explained to us that the liver has many functions and it was the only organ in the human body that could regenerate itself. Sometimes, the liver is too sick to be able to do that. When she was brought in, she had less than 10% of her liver working, 10% is the minimum you need to stay alive. He said that they biopsy seemed to indicate that the liver is now functioning at 50% of its capabilities but there was no way to know if that was just in that lobe (the liver has 4 lobes) or if it was throughout the liver. The other unknown is that her liver would not be able to regenerate any more than what it already has done so far. There seems to be so many unknowns… He said, however, that it could be possible that it would continue to regenerate as well. All of this, he added, would take months and months of rehabilitation. The three areas of concern would be that she would develop an infection, that her kidneys would stop working, or her liver would quit. I decided to return to San Jose for a few days to get some work done with my students since the end of the school year is fast approaching. I am sorry this was so long, but hopefully the next few days will be uneventful, although, we are looking at another surgery on Friday morning to change the dressings.