So, Darren’s surgery ended about 8:45pm. Three hours long. The surgeon said they removed 3cm of his left lobe and all of the hippocampus. The hippocampus (people have 2 of them, now Darren has 1) organizes your memories and deals with spatial relation.
Darren got into his room around 10pm. He was howling in pain!
They mentioned he might be weak on the right side (nope!). Said he would have temporary speech issues (only lag time giving answers) and they said he might be missing part of his eyesight (nope) so that is all positive!
He was in an extreme amount of pain most of the night. They gave him oxygen to help alleviate the pain and it did seem to help in between dosages of pain meds.
He talked about how concerned he was his sister was out of town again, and he told me to get “it” out of the garage and bring it to him. Never figured what “it” was. He shooed me away to get “it”
One of his “lines” kept “missing” on his monitor and so that went off several times in the night. He has a brace on his wrist to keep it in line now.
We were told those “cool EEG leads” that were inside of his head were ours if we wanted them. So he has a memento when he goes home. We were also told they were $10,000 worth of medical equipment and so to ask for them. So I did during surgery and they had to run them through 2 sterilization/decontamination washes before we could have them.
They do not have his head in a turban of any kind. They have 3 strips of gauze pads with baby staples attached to his head instead this time.
Oh funny story! Darren (@darrenlong315) follows his surgeon on twitter. The surgeon mainly tweets about Catholic history and events, but we still follow him. We mentioned this to his Hospital Girlfriend and she took the marker they use for marking the surgery and wrote on his head @pcamarata TWEET ME! @darrenlong315. So we all thought this was funny. Well, the surgeon had his intern get him ready instead and the surgeon didn’t see it.
So when the Surgeon came to talk to us I asked and he said he hadn’t seen it. I showed him the picture and he laughed. I know Darren will be disappointed to hear this. So, when he comes to the room he has this large black unreadable mark on his forehead. The nurse said “they told us he asked to keep that on his forehead” – What???? Again this morning the new RN asked “Is it true he is a tech geek?” I asked him how heard and he pointed to the black mark on his forehead. I am afraid to wash it off for fear of more pain.
BTW: the surgeon tweeted at 11:45pm that he had been in surgery since 7am and was beat. I retweeted and thanked him for his service.
The Catalpa Chronicles 