The surgery lasted about 5.6 hours. Dr. Gibb worked on her neck redraining the left side and draining the right side and leaving drains in. Dr. McCann (spelling?) then drained the right side of her chest and the mediastinum area. He left two tubes there for drains. He then used the videoscope to look around the left side of her chest, he didn't find any pus but they left a tube in place just in case any begins collecting.

The work done on the right side of her chest was a thoracotomy, here are some choice quotes from Wikipedia about such operations: "Thoracotomies are thought to be one of the hardest surgical incisions to deal with post-op, because they are exquisitely painful and the pain can prevent the patient from breathing effectively, leading to atelectasis or pneumonia." and "One has to realize that this procedure is a major insult to the human body and one which is only ever performed for most serious conditions."

The operation on the left side was a VATS (video assisted thoracic surgery), which the astute reader will remember is the surgery they performed on me almost 5 years ago for my collapsed lung. According to the ICU nurse it is also one of the most painful surgeries to recover from. If you recall, I received an epidural for the duration of my recovery. Jess cannot have an epidural due to the infection, so they must try to control her pain with less targeted drugs. The end result is that she is in incredible pain.

She was moved to the cardio-pulmonary wing of the ICU where she will stay for the next few days. She has more tubes coming out of her than I've ever seen before. She has a breathing tube, the tube in the nose, drains coming out of her neck, two drains on the right side of her chest, and a drain on the left side. She is the biggest mess I've ever seen. They have her as sedated as possible without overdosing her on pain medication. She can hear us and somewhat respond (hard to do because of the large quantity of things attached to her). Unfortunately, the more awake she tries to be to respond to visitors the more pain she feels. So we only visited for a few minutes tonight to let her know we where there and that her mom is flying in tomorrow.

Dr. Gibb said that the drains will help but are not a 100% guarantee that they will continue to effectively drain the abscess. So there is still the possibility of further surgery. They took a bunch more blood and are running more cultures to determine what the exact infection is. The current best guess is that it's a anaerobic bacteroides. The bad news of this diagnosis is: "In general, Bacteroides are resistant to a wide variety of antibiotics..." [wikipedia]. Hopefully the cultures will be able to pinpoint the exact infection allow a more effective selection of antibiotics to treat her with.

Now I'm going to try to get a few hours of sleep, it will probably be largely unsuccessful.

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