Myron Nightingale

Welcome to our CaringBridge site. We've created it to keep friends and family updated. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement during this time when it matters most.  Dad went into the hospital on May 5 to have colon surgery.  He had a hard spot that needed to be removed.  The doctor removed 2 or 3 inches of his colon and thankfully the spot was not cancerous. One thing the doctor found was that his spleen had been hurt at some time and Dad has no idea when that would have happened.  There was a lot of scar tissue around it and when he tried to pull the colon together to stitch it up, it wouldn't pull together easily so that is when he went exploring to see what was going on and found the spleen damage.  Everything got put back together okay although it did result in an extra long incision.   We expected him to be home in 4 or 5 days but it has not gone as expected.  The doctor started letting him have some liquids and felt like things should be progressing normally but they didn't.  After several days of liquids and a little other food, Dad started to have a lot of nausea and just could not eat much.   On Saturday, a little over a week after the surgery, he was very miserable and after doing a cat scan and finding a kink in the small intestine,  they put a tube into his stomach, through his nose.  It was not a fun thing to have done.  Dad said it just didn't feel right and kept gagging on it.  They eventually took it out and put it back in again and this time it was put in the right place and was not so uncomfortable although putting it in was still awful!  They began to take everything out of his stomach and that helped on the nausea and bloated feeling.  They had hoped by having the tube in and emptying everything out of his stomach that the kink would go away on its own and we could avoid another surgery.  They measured the amount of stuff they were getting out of his stomach and the doctor said when they quit getting a lot out of his stomach that things would be working right again.  We waited and waited for that to happen but no luck.  They still kept getting plenty out and no bowel movement or any sign that things were working right again.  The doctor finally decided he would have to do surgery again.  So on May 24 he once again went into surgery.  He started surgery at 1:25 and it took 4 hours of surgery.  He removed 4 feet of his small intestine.  He said it was the hardest thing he had done in 2 years.  They had told us that they were dealing with a lot of adhesions during surgery.  When the doctor came and talked to us he told us that his intestines had grown together into a mass of scar tissue right in the middle.  He said when he did the first surgery everything had been healthy so this happened in the time since his other surgery.  So after another major surgery it will take take to heal up again.