Day 5 Post-op

After switching places with Emma and DJ for a couple of days, I returned to Stanford yesterday afternoon. Kristi continues to make very slow progress. I did some research and learned that surgeries involving the intestines typically take about three to seven days before they begin working properly again. She’s now five days post-op, and today we finally saw some encouraging signs that her intestines might be “rebooting.” I won’t go into graphic detail, but we were genuinely excited when she had her first bowel movement since the surgery on Saturday.

Over the past two days, she has been sleeping a lot. When she’s awake, the majority of pain she feels isn’t related to her surgery—it’s coming from her neck. For about two months now, she’s had increasing pain in the lower part of the back of her neck. Since being here, it’s really been bothering her. We learned from the PET scan done on Saturday, just before surgery, that she has a new tumor on her C3 vertebra—that’s exactly where the pain is. Of course, we’re speculating a bit, but it certainly seems to make sense. That spot didn’t show up on the August scan, and since then the pain has slowly worsened, so it feels like a pretty clear connection.

Unfortunately, because this issue isn’t directly related to her current hospitalization, we’ll need to talk with her oncologist to see if someone can evaluate it. We’re hoping she’ll stop by again tomorrow to discuss it with us.

Kristi continues to be NPO (Latin for nil per os, meaning “nothing by mouth”). She does still sneak a little ice and an occasional tiny sip of water—though the tube just removes it anyway. We’re hopeful they might clamp the NG tube tomorrow to test whether it’s ready to come out. We’ll see.

A harpist came by today as part of the hospital’s arts enrichment program—she played right in Kristi’s room. It was lovely and soothing.