Here is a picture of Lucas last christmas on the trike we bought him. He was 4 mounths old. I don't have a current picture of him on this trike but I have to announce that last week he learned to make it go by himself and the excitement of this just bursts from his whole body. I am so busy enjoying his enthusiasm that I have failed to take a picture of it all.

What do you write about when not much is changing with my health?

Two nights ago I actually had a full night not having to breathe through my mouth. I was hoping that good respiration would help me return to a full nights sleep but one night did not convince the body of my recovery, it seems, amd elas the body knew better. My friend returned during the night, last night, and I woke up this morning with carpet mouth again.

I had my first visit to the doctor since the surgery. He has indicated I will be off for another 6 weeks. That would mean a return to work at some level in June. That is if I don't win the lottery first.

In a couple of weeks I will be given an insulin tolerance test. That should be interesting to report on. It seems they use insulin to test reaction of the pituitary gland. I'll keep my fingers crossed that the reaction is favorable.

Beyond that there is a review of my body chemistry by endocronology in May and a review by the doctor that did the surgery in early June.

My energy level is still above what is was before the surgery and I am not experiencing any pain or discomfort to report on. I can feel that the mouth is still healing and the stitches above the front teeth are disolving. I am sneezing a few times a day. I try not to but I think it is impossible to control. When I sneeze I let it out through my mouth to reduce pressure in the sinus cavity. I think the sinus cavitity is healing like the rest of me and no longer wants the drainage fluids there. That is why I sneeze. Hopfully the drainage will stop and things can get back to normal in that area.

All other systems are go. Even teh butt has been behaving itself, if that can ever be said with a straight face. Remember - Fiber is your friend!

There are so many great things about being home. You don't have the noise of the hospital - yes it is noisy. You have your own bed. You have your hobbies. But coming home after surgery can be a little scary too! Many people said,” I hope they did not send you home to early." "I hope they know what they are doing." You also find out when you get home that you can't do what you think you should be able to do. And this tends to scare you. For example the first time I walked up the stairs to bed that Tuesday evening I could not believe how winded I was. The next day we did the Ikea marathon walk. The walk itself was not so bad but there is a number of stairs to get to the second floor and I have never felt so winded as when I got to the top. I had to stop and just rest. For someone like me that likes to spend 20 minutes on a stepper this was a bit of a shock. I guess the thing about being home is you don't have someone you can talk to if you have a concern about how you are healing. While you are in the hospital you can easily get an answer.

What you learn after surgery is you need to try every task on for size first and make sure your capable of doing it before you attempt in with any real effort. You need to be prepared to take a rest and perhaps leave a job over for the second day. You will have days where you just need to take a nap and if your not careful one of your loving children just might catch you in the act when you come over for dinner (see above picture). All in all being home is the best place to heal when you are past the critical stages.

It has been over 2 weeks now since my surgery and I am still oozing from the right sinus. I am not in any pain but I sure wish things would dry up. My energy level is high, which may be attributed to the hormone pills. My mind wants to climb a mountain but logically now I know that I will tire before I reach the top. Things get better every day - little by little.

I am not sleeping the night through. I am not sure why. Some nights it is all I can do to stay awake till 10pm after a full day but it sleep does not last 8 hrs. I don't seem to need the 8 like I used to but I force myself to stay at lest 7 and do fall asleep again. It may be because I am still not healed. I wake up with a dry mouth form not being able to breath through my nose or I roll over and an area of tenderness wakes me up. When your body has an injury your brain tends to focus on it at times during the day and perhaps night to ask for a reassessment. How are things healing. That may be what is going on for me. I guess I may find out the answer when I heal completely.

My bruising from the hospital is fading but is still not gone. I was only in there just over a week. I cannot imagine what they must do to a patient that has to stay longer.

My eyesight is still great and I am not aware of any other symptoms. The Police have not been to the door so I guess the doc that put me to sleep was good to his word and did not make any calls to turn me in. Life is good.

G

The first thing I should comment on in the blog is why I signed the last message JG. Was it a typo or was it a lead in to this next installment? You decide.

I have had many nic names and all of them I have been given by my family. When I lived in Ontario and wanted desperately to move to Calgary, Alberta I often wore a cowboy hat. This often brought about the nic name Tex and at one plant I worked I made up a sheriffs badge and pasted it to my jacket. Some of my staff got into the act and wore a cowboy hat too and we had a couple of gunslinger moments right in the middle of the plant. But it kept everyone laughing and we actually had fun at work. Now isn’t that a novel idea?

The J stands for Jack or to be more specific Jack Nicholson. Ever since the Batman movie with the Joker in it my daughter has felt that my smile can sometimes remind her of that Jack. Sometimes when she would ask me a question, a question that she should already know the answer too: Did she need to clean her room before Friday night so she could go out on a date? I would often just give her the Jack smile and thus the nic has stuck. Lately my wife has started calling me Jack too. She knows it makes me smile – I think she secretly loves my smile.

Why do I tell you this? Well we need to go back to the Foothills Health Center for the explanation. They had prescribed a different hormone treatment and it sure improved my skin crawl situation. When My wife came in to see me she walked into the hospital room and said,” And how are you feeling today JACK!” This was probably not the best thing to do with the nurse in the room. They are so paranoid about who the patient is and ID bracelets etc. that when she heard this she went into panic mode. She was looking after the wrong patient in the wrong room. It did not take too long to explain the situation to her but it did provide us a round of laughter.

That day I did not require any pain medication and I was hoping that my bowls would shake loose from the codeine grip they were under and start to produce. As I eluded to earlier that was not to be the case.

That night I had one of the best sleeps I have had in a long time. I am not sure why and I really did not fall deep asleep until 4am but when I woke up at 7:30 it felt wonderful. Perhaps it was what happened at 2am. I went out to get a glass of ice water and a container of milk. My stomach was bothering me a little – probably the hormones. I walked out of the room and the nursing staff was on a break. They were drinking Timmy’s. They all turned to look at me. I had a white rolled bandage looped up below my nose and I had a smile on my face that looks like the joker and I said,” I smell Tim Horton’s Coffee.” Well it cracked everyone up. To their credit I did get a response. They said they would check with me the next time they were going on a coffee run. If you don’t quite get the humour well remember my nose is plugged with drainage and it is impossible for me to smell anything.

The best news of all came at breakfast. My new nurse assignment informed me that they were thinking of giving me the boot that day. Surgery Saturday afternoon and going home Tuesday afternoon. Works for me. My daughter Jenn was coming up with Lucas for a visit and I told her to be prepared to take me home.

The ride home was a little bit much. I don’t think my body was ready for a trip down the dearfoot during rush hour. I had not felt any nausea since the surgery but when I got home I felt like I had just got off the eliminator or whatever you call your favorite roller coaster.

I do need to put one myth to bed. You have probably often heard the expression – don’t believe everything you see on TV. The hospital had no intention of putting me in a wheel chair to get to the front door. I think this may be the final test. If the patient can carry all his belongings and the floral arrangements and make it to the car without falling down then he is good to go. I even asked about the chair. So it was not a mistake. We don’t do that.

Next stop – healing at home.

JG

I did receive a comment as to who the good looking baby is? Well that is my 7 month old grandson Lucas Gordon Park. Here he is learning how to use a tape measure. You can see from the picture that my nose has returned to normal size. This is post surgey by 2 weeks.

What does it take to heal from brain surgery? Well that is the question. I don’t know the answer but I am learning more every day.

After breakfast the morning after the surgery they start again with the hormones. I was feeling better than expected and doing some walking. Still had the IV shunt but no IV running. They would start it as required for antibiotic use. I required this as long as the trumpets were installed. They would flush the IV line periodically throughout the day. For anyone who knows me this is not my favorite pass time. I don’t like needles. I actually think we should rename hospitals to The needle house.

The doc was in and we discussed how I was feeling. Since he saw my family was visiting he did mention that he had taken the time to straighten my nose out as had been suggested by Alexis. I think this caught her by surprise that I had actually passed on her request to the doc. This made everyone laugh but this time there was no blood spurt from my nose. Guess I left my mouth open when I laughed. He said the packing would be removed today and he would have my nurse and the floor charge nurse do it after supper.

Removal of the nose packing was the next big thing on the agenda. After all you don’t want to go through life looking like a pig. That would happen after supper. It was suggested that I take something for any pain before the packing was removed. Tylenol 3s were selected so they were given a couple of hours before the deed was to be done. The actual event turned out to be a non-event kind of like Y2K. There was not a lot of pain but I will admit when the packing removed there was a lot of warm gushing flow. The trumpets were removed first and they seemed to just drop out. I will admit I had my eyes closed but they showed me they were out before I knew they had done anything. The right side packing did seem to take a little effort to extract and to this day I have had more oozing from this right side. It seems more work was done from this side than the left. Perhaps the doc is left-handed? I will have to ask him that when I next see him. My only thought when the packing was being removed and the gushing flow came - I sure hope the seal holds up there in my brain and the flow slows down because right now I think everything is being emptied out the nose.

It was over quickly and I never saw how much actually was collected in the towels. Nothing made it to the bedclothes and it probably felt like the flow was larger than it really was. They put an ooze catcher below my nose and I was good to go. Before my stay was over I learned how to make these things. You take a two by four ( not the wooden kind ) and tie a gause strip to it that goes around the back of the head and over the ears like the frame of reading glass. I had to show some of the new nurses how to make it. Some of them wanted to use tape. I would have no part of that. There had been enough things glued to my skin over the last few days. All of which had to be removed. Tape is not your friend!

I started too feel relief immediately that the trumpets were removed. My nose started to shrink – yes shrink! I was no my way back to normal.

That night for pain, which I was feeling very little of, I decided to take just normal Tylenol. That might have been a major mistake. I was not feeling any pain from the surgery but by morning the hormones that they were giving me were driving me around the bend. I was very emotional and wanted to cry over nothing that I could define. My skin felt like it was on fire. I had gotten up in the night to put lotion all over my skin in hopes to put the fire out. Perhaps a better way to describe it is crawling skin. I was very uncomfortable. I refused to let them take any blood before breakfast. My skin was on fire and I could no deal with a vampire right now.

The day nurse from yesterday was on again today. I paged her at breakfast and told her of my problems. She was great and said I needed to take Tylenol 3s again – not for physical pain but drug related pain. This is something I did not want to do. They may work for pain but the codeine tends to shut down the digestive tract. This is not a good thing. The butt runs the body. It is more important than the heart, the lungs and the brain because if it fails to function the others soon shutdown. To go home they usually like the Butt to be working.

So back on the drug wagon! My endocrinology (hormones) doc showed up and I told her about the skin crawl. They did prescribe a different hormone that I am on now but I don’t know if this was because of my reaction to the first one or if this was the plan all along.

All I can say is that they sent me home without the butt working so I warn anyone that needs to take Tylenol 3s – beware. And it was not for lack of trying to get things working. I had the nurse that evening give me a laxative and I had been drinking fiber drinks for two days. That first movement was sure a pleasure but it happened at home.

J G

Since we have some time to pass while I am in surgery I think I should mention a few more symptoms that I failed to list earlier. I noticed a sensitivity to light – especially fluorescent lights in a well-lit store. Funny you are having trouble seeing everything and yet your eyes are feeling overly sensitive. Perhaps the iris opens more to try to see everything. I don’t know.

My energy levels had been lower and in the last year I had been unable to not pass through a year without a cold or ear infection. In each case I needed eardrops to get me over the illness.

I was probably grumpier too but nothing I can really pin point. Hey! Once a bear always a bear – I think.

OK surgery must be done by now.

What can you say about the recovery room. What do you even remember? I do remember how nice the warm blankets feel. I seem to recall them asking questions. I think they want to make you wake up when all you want to do is sleep. Go figure – your in a hospital – you are not there to sleep.

I do remember the doc stopping by briefly. He said the tumor was gone and that he thinks the pituitary did not look damaged and he did not think it was attached to the tumor. He asked about my sight and I said it was much improved. Now my eyes were watering from my swollen sinus but I could definitely see. No missing letters.

About suppertime I was moved to the Neurology ward but into a staging area to monitor more than one patient returning from surgery. I was still wired with a heart monitor and the hourly on slot of blood pressure, temperature etc. began. Sue, Jennifer and Alexis were there to greet me. I was a sight to see. My nose was more than twice it’s normal size - really! It was packed with some kind of absorbent material and there were two plastic horns jammed up in there to keep everything in place. They told me I really did not want to see what I looked like. I think I heard the word pig mentioned if that brings up a picture in your mind. I do remember Alexis said something that we all thought was funny. Unfortunately no one can remember exactly what is was but when I tried to laugh I snorted a red spray that came out of somewhere – perhaps my nose – and flew around the bed clothes. This just made everybody laugh even louder and longer with me trying to keep from a further red discharge. Here I was worried I might gross everyone out and here is the comment I got from Alexis in an email. Don't feel bad that I came down on the weekend, it was my decision and I wouldn't have wanted to miss seeing blood shoot out of the trumpets in your nose!

I do remember that my mouth was dry and they gave me some ice water to drink and a sponge sucker to soak in the ice water and moisturize my lips and palate. It was like nectar. I drank a lot of water that night. They were monitoring my liquid intake and any discharge through the catheter. I was also wearing pneumatic stockings that pumped up every few minutes to massage my legs and help the blood circulation. If the unit was not about $2000 I think I would consider buying one. I guess it helps to prevent blood clotting in the legs when you are not active. About 10 pm I started to feel “good”. The “girls” went home for the night. I tried to doze off between the activation of the socks, the blood pressure tests, the noise on the ward, and the trumpets up my nose.

I did take some morphine around suppertime but I was not feeling that sore. I really don’t know what the big deal is with that stuff. I didn’t fell any real buzz or anything. At 10pm they wanted me to take something for the pain. I really didn’t have a lot. Can’t say I was totally comfortable with my pig nose and some swelling but not really in pain. They don’t want you to slip into a level of pain so I agreed to take some Tylenol 3s. I have felt worse coming home from the dentist. The doc knows his stuff.

About 4am they moved me into a room. They liked the fact that I was keeping all the water down and was not feeling nauseous. No more Heart monitor. I got to watch the sunrise over Calgary from the 12th floor of the hospital. The saline drip was stopped as I was drinking a lot of water.

Breakfast arrived at 8am and I was ready to eat. The mouth was a little tender. It was not painful but I could not use my mouth, as I normally would have. I had some difficulty using a straw too. I ate everything that they sent me. With breakfast came my hormones, and of course the vampires showed up for blood samples. The dreaded IV was still in my left arm. I had to take antibiotics until the trumpets were removed. That was scheduled for after supper. They usually leave them in for 24 hours.

I think Luke showed up that morning with my Daughter Jenn and Sue and Alexis. I had made everyone who drew blood or even asked me any questions look at my picture of Luke. He did not know what he was seeing. The trumpets are plastic cones but at the ends there is grab rings to help with removal. I think Luke was tempted to grab hold and see what happened. Take a look at his picture don’t you just know he wanted to pull on the trumpets. He was making me nervous. As I was to find out later that evening he probably could have easily pulled them out. I’m glad I made him keep his distance.

So much for the surgery now let the healing begin.

G

The next day my wife drove me back to the Rocky View Hospital for the visual acuity test. They wanted to see exactly what I was not seeing. You sit in front of a big white half globe. There is a small hole in the center and they shine a small light through that hole. You have one eye covered so you look with one eye. While you stare at the center light you are suppose to indicate when you see a light traveling across the “globe” from any direction but always from the outside in, from the top or from the bottom. I could see the lights in the peripheral area I think OK but as they moved more directly in line with each eye there were areas where I could not see it at all. I know Susan was cheering me on. Wishing me to see the light. It was like a competition but there were times when the signal button was silent and we all knew that the enemy light got away without injury.
It will certainly give them some interesting data to consider.

When we returned to Foothills I was informed that the Surgery was tentatively scheduled for tomorrow – Friday. They explained the procedure. In my case they had decided to enter above the top row of teeth up under the front lip, into the sinus and from there into the brain. This would give the quickest access to the tumor and the pituitary cavity.

There were some risks to be aware of:
1) In less than 1% of cases they could damage the carotid artery that runs up the brain stem into the brain. This would not be good and could lead to serious complications and death.
2) There could be damage to the pituitary from the surgery that sometimes led to a type of diabetes that we would need to get under control. About 5% chance.
3) Pituitary damage could also require me to take hormone replacements for the rest of my life. A very manageable condition. I was on hormone now because the tumor was, at least restricting the pituitary from working properly.
4) It was important that they get a good seal of the brain cavity when the surgery was over as leaking brain fluid is not a good thing. No sneezing, coughing, no exertions of any kind and lots of fiber. Little did they know that fiber has been my friend for years.

I signed the consent form that I was aware of the risks.
I was also worried about hiccups. It seems that the hormone they were giving me loved giving them to me. The family was always suggesting methods for me to stop. Drink from the back side of a glass, the paper bag thing etc. I was not going for any of that. It was the drugs. For some reason I stopped getting them. Perhaps I was getting used to the hormone drug.

So I ate my last supper that Thursday evening. Nothing by mouth after midnight. I should say at this point I cannot complain about the hospital food. Hey it was not ribs from Earls! The important thing to do is fill in your menu selection form. Choose everything you can and always include a desert or two. They bring it right to your bed side and no tipping allowed.
Friday was not to be the day. At 2:30 they decided I could eat my lunch and that ended the waiting. They fed me supper and then back on the band wagon at midnight. Nothing by mouth. I was allowed to have some milk at 11pm with my hormone pill. You just need something food like when your taken that stuff just to keep the stomach quiet.

I had a nice surprise that Friday evening. My daughter from Edmonton arrived to cheer me up. I did not expect this and it was a nice surprise after the fasting most of the day. I told her about the surgery and we talked about how university is going for her. She asked me to ask the doc to work on my nose while he was doing the surgery. She never said exactly what she wanted done. What’s wrong with my Roman nose anyway. The best part was the card game we had and I need to record for posterity that I won the game. The game is called school and I have to admit that she has been the school queen most of the time but not this night. I FINALLY WON A GAME!
I should point out that the santa Clause that I was holding up earlier in a previous chapter was given to me at christmas by her. I get one every year and the one was a pooping santa. Now what do you do with a person like that except give her gloves with teh finger cut off.

Just after lunch on Saturday I was off to surgery. There had not been a set time. I ask the nursing desk to call my wife and laid back for the ride to the operating room. I was determined not to look around much in the room. It can be a scary place if you see something they are going to use on you that you really should not see. The doc was there to put me to sleep. He was funny and cute in an Al Pachino kind of way. He told me to breath deep but my body wanted to go to sleep. I asked him to give me the good drugs. He said, “I’m the best “pusher” in all of Calgary”. “I deliver only the best stuff”. Then he said,” here it comes and I promise if you’ll slip me some cash I won’t call the IRS or the police with anything you are about to reveal”. Now you know how he paid for med school.

Surgery lasted a couple of hours and I was sent to recovery about 3:30.

G