Recovery Day 3

So here we are 72 hours after surgery and although the surgery was a success, the recovery process is a bit up and down.  Mum still has an epidural in the top part of her body and when it works - it works really well.  However it hasn't been working all the time, so when the pain gets to unbearable for her the pain management team needs to come and top up the dose.  She also has a morphine pump which makes her groggy but helps keep the pain under control.  The epidural also makes her feel nauseous so she hasn't really had much food other than a bit of mushroom soup on Saturday.  The incision site is quite large (approx. 12 cm across her side, like where you would wear a belt).  I think because it was such a large tumour and because they had to remove the tumour on the lymph node as well it is more painful than a typical nephrectomy (which is when they just remove the tumour and kidney).  I made an error though in my blog and said that they took out her adrenal gland but they did not so she still has two of those, which is a good thing.  The adrenal glands help to keep your energy levels up so it's better that they didn't have to remove that (even though you have two).


Our main motivation is to help Mum get her pain under control and hopefully over the next few days we can have the epidural removed and be able to start managing her pain with other forms of medications.  We will hope to have my mum home later on this week.


Thank you for all your well wishes.  I just wish I could take all the pain away from my mum and deal with it myself but of course that isn't possible.  So we will all just do our best to make sure she is in good spirits and as comfortable as possible.


Love to all,
Keryn (and mummy)