We’ve hit a milestone: Derek has remained out of the hospital for over a month. He’s slowly but steadily gaining back the strength that he lost during his long battle with PSC and end stage liver disease as well as his 2 month hospital stay. We are thankful!

In his first six weeks since his initial January discharge, he was re-hospitalized three times. His course and recovery continue to be complicated.

His first outpatient imaging in late January showed a new, urgent finding of a hepatic pseudoaneurysm, or an out-pouching of vasculature in the liver that could be fatal if it ruptured. A hepatic pseudoaneursym is a rare complication of liver trauma, or in Derek’s case, the failed attempt to place a second PTHC drain in his liver in early January. He was urgently readmitted to the hospital and Interventional Radiology quickly performed a procedure to embolize the surrounding blood vessels. Thankfully he didn’t have any complications and was discharged within a few days.

However, about a week and a half later, he developed increasing left sided abdominal pain — which is odd given the liver and drain are on the right side of the abdomen. Strangely, the liver team did not find reason for the pain, and he was discharged home within a few days once again.

Yet his pain mounted and became severe, and he spiked a fever suddenly about a week and a half later. He went back to the hospital, and this time it was apparent on imaging that he had suffered a spontaneous retroperitoneal hematoma. He is still anticoagulated due to the many blood clots he developed during his initial hospitalization, putting him at higher risk of bleeding, and he had spontaneously developed bleeding in his left flank area. The hematoma was bilobed and sizable — likely caused by two attempts to drain fluid collections from his abdomen post-transplant when the hepatology team was trying to locate the infection source before they discovered the biliary leak and biloma eroding into his vena cava. The hematoma was very painful for many weeks but it has finally been easing up.

Needless to say, Derek’s still dealing with numerous nosocomial sequelae. All of this will still take time to gradually improve.  He continues to split his time between his mother’s home during my work week and our home on the weekends as he still needs a lot of rest. Functioning as a single working mother to an infant (now toddler!) over the past few months has been the most demanding role I’ve ever had. We are celebrating the small moments as a family of three and remain so grateful to Theresa (who is doing incredibly well and feels back to normal in many aspects already).

As always, thank you to those of you who have prayed for us and supported us along this winding path. Many of you continue to check in with us and help our family in tangible and meaningful ways. We continue to feel your encouragement and embrace from both near and far.