Just when things were getting settled....

You know last week I felt like we were starting to really get the hang of our new school schedule. We read scriptures, had FHE, I exercised every day, I ate well, etc...the only off thing last week was that Jacob had a stomach virus.

I should have known. So, here's how our weekend went. I just copied what Matt posted on his family's website (and added my comments in parenthsies) to save time.

"Jacob started feeling sick last Sunday with throwing up and nausea. Monday and Tuesday were better days. On Wednesday he came home from school sick. From Thursday on, he got worse. The nausea kind of turned into intense abdominal cramping and he was throwing up often. Friday night was a bad night. Saturday morning, Lindy took Jacob to urgent care. They gave him fluids for dehydration and morphine for the pain. They did some basic lab tests (and an X-ray..everything came back normal)and concluded that his stomach was producing too much acid and sent him home (with heartburn medicene). Jacob rested most of Saturday (due to the morphine). About 9 pm he started feeling sick again and quickly started feeling extreme pain (and started throwing up a lot again). We should have acted sooner, but we waited until midnight and took him to the ER ( I got home from work at 11:30pm and we left shortly after I got home). At the ER, they again did the IV and morphine. They also sent him for a CT scan (we spent most of the night trying to get him to drink all that red liquid for the scan)which detected a large mass in his intestines. Lindy and Jacob were then taken by ambulance to Primary Children's Hospital Sunday morning. The doctors there decided that they needed to perform surgery. They were concerned that something could be cutting off blood supply to portions of Jacob's intestines, causing tissue to die. So, we went from a sick stomach to surgery pretty fast.

The doctors told Lindy several possible things that they could find in the surgery. The possibilites ranged from not too bad to very bad (cancer or losing major portions of his intestines and bowel). Anyway, Lindy and I were extremely relieved when the surgeon called to tell us what they had found. Jacob had a Meckel's diverticulum, which is a small bulge in the small intestine present at birth.in approximately 2% of the population. This became a starting point for intussusception or telescoping of the small intestine. In Jacob’s case, the telescoped section had telescoped again, so there were many layers (eight) of intestine telescoped together. The good news – the surgeons were able to “untelescope” the affected area without cutting his intestines. None of the tissue had died. They removed the Meckel's diverticulum and took out his appendix because they were already there.

As expected, Jacob is not feeling great, but he’s going to be fine. The recovery will take a few weeks. He will be in the hospital for 4 or 5 days. By today or tomorrow he will be ready for visitors. On the bright side, we think this surgery solved Jacob’s problem that he first experienced 4 years ago (just before we left AZ)."

So that's it in a nutshell. I pulled my first "all nighter" since college. I woke up Saturday morning at 7am and finally got to take a 2 hour nap yesterday (thanks Ron and Ria). So , when I finally got to go to sleep at the hospital at 10pm yeasterday I slept well. It was the best hospital night's sleep I've ever gotten...probably because it wasn't me they were coming in to poke.

I'm guessing it will be an interesting week....