Round Two

For those of you who have been regularly following along you know that, at least medically, it’s been a quiet around here lately. It was good to slow down and re-charge after those few months of complete turmoil. Now it’s time to shake it up again.

If you’ve just joined us in progress, or haven’t checked in since Renee first got out of the hospital in Mid-December, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. The rest of us will wait while you go over all of the previous posts to catch up.

Rest of us, I hope you brought snacks, it will be a while ......

Are we all on the same page now? Good.

Renee is slated for the next round of surgery on Wednesday, June 24th. We’ll be heading back up to the Cleveland Clinic for the second stage of this three part series. The first stage was to remove the cursed colon and to build the temporary ileostomy that has allowed Renee to purge waste product into a plastic bag glued to her side. Next week’s stage two surgery will be to build the internal pouch from the small intestine. It is essentially an interior colostomy bag and will play the part of the colon since this organ has left the building. The pouch and surrounding areas will be given about three months to heal, and sometime in the fall, Renee will return once again to Cleveland to have the third stage. At that time they will reverse the ileostomy and connect the interior pouch to the rectum allowing a semi-normal bathroom process to resume.

This all sounds pretty routine, doesn’t it? Well if you’ve been paying attention then you know nothing is routine around here. So stick around and follow as we trek on up to Cleveland to subject Renee to yet another round of extremely invasive maneuvers. I’ll try to make it as painful for you as it will be for Renee. Grab your morphine buttons, check your brakes, and don’t even think about removing your hands from the sissy bar, we’re just about to start clicking our way up that first steep hill.

Aren’t you just tingling with excitement?