Isn't it amazing...

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...that my Dad can get through both a triple-bypass and aneurisym repair operations relatively unscathed but "routine" hernia repair surgery has caused so much grief!

He had the hernia repair op done last Friday using keyhole surgery and would have been allowed home the same day if he hadn't had problems with urinating ~ apparently this is not uncommon.  Anyhoo, he was allowed out on Sunday and all seemed fine.

However, by Monday lunchtime things were not well at all; I found out later that he was bent over double in excruciating pain and Mum called for an ambulence.  She phoned to let me know that Dad had been taken back into hospital ~ although she didn't say how bad things actually were until she finally managed to get hold of my sister later in the day.  So Amanda came and picked me up and off to Bedford Hospital we drove ~ wondering just what was going on, bearing in mind the somewhat conflicting information we had been given by our Mum!

Once we got to A&E it was obvious that things were not good at all; quite why Mum hadn't made that clear to me earlier in the day I do not know.  Dad was in such awful pain and it was plain to see just how swollen his stomach was.  It turned out that en route to the hospital, the ambulence crew had had to stop to "work" on Dad as his blood-pressure and oxygen levels had dropped terribly low, and there were concerns about his heart.  He had a CT scan which showed that there was a small perforation in his bowel (to be fair, a risk he had been warned of before the keyhole surgery) and infection had set in.  It was decided to operate again and we all went home once he had been taken down to theatre.

I stayed overnight with Mum and we got a phone call at about 1.10am to say that, thankfully, all had gone well with the operation.  They removed the mesh originally used to repair the hernia and used stitches instead.  The bowel perforation was also repaired and Dad's stomach flushed to remove the infection.

Mum and I went to visit Dad early yesterday afternoon in the ICU and it was a relief to see just how much better he looked compared to the previous evening.  He isn't a man to make much of any pain he might be in, and so to have seen him in such agony was both a shock and a confirmation that he was very poorly indeed.  Amanda went to visit him last night and he actually told her that he had thought he was going to die :-(

We don't know how long he will be kept in the ICU but hopefully he will soon be back up on one of the wards and then well enough to be allowed home.