My LaLa

I haven’t blogged any in the last 2 weeks because of the holidays and because for the past 11 days our family has been at my Aunt LaLa’s bedside in the hospital.  LaLa is my Aunt Laurie and she’s been incredibly sick.  It’s all a very long story, starting back around 27 years ago…but the guts of it is that Laurie has Familia Polyposis and had a surgery those years ago to create a pouch inside her abdomen that would remove her body’s waste.  In recent years, LaLa has been experiencing pain and unknown internal bleeding, causing iron deficiencies and therefore iron treatments and blood transfusions.  To gain a better view of her abdomen, she swallowed a camera capsule.  The camera should have moved out on it’s own or at most been removed laproscopically.  Unfortunately, neither was successful for Laurie. 

On November 16, Laurie underwent surgery to remove the camera.  While her surgeon was there, he removed about 5 inches of her bowel that looked to be causing her the pain and bleeding.  We were grateful to have an answer.  But, on Nov. 23, LaLa had to go back into surgery because her intestines had started leaking bile and infection was setting up.  After the 2nd surgery, we thought surely there couldn’t be any more complications.  We were wrong.  Yesterday, the bile started leaking again and her surgeon put her on the surgery schedule for Monday.  However, this morning LaLa woke up with a saturated dressing on her incision wound and knew immediately something was terribly wrong.  Her surgeon took one look at it and knew right away that surgery had to take place today.  After 3 more hours of surgery her surgeon removed another foot of bowel and removed her pouch and performed an iliostomy.

We all have a peace after this surgery that we haven’t had after the other 2.  She’s in ICU for a couple of days to get specialized care and we are very thankful for that.  There are more details and twists and turns to her story, but this is the gist.  We’re so thankful that her surgeon and gastroenterologist have invested so much into Laurie and want her to better just as much as her family does.  If you think about it, please pray that there are no further leaks in her intestines and that she can begin the healing process.