Carl's Off The Table And Recovery Ensues

Carl is home from the hospital at last.  

He has never really had quite the assault upon his person that he has had the last five days in his whole life.  

He had stents put in his heart arteries -- a couple in the early nineties and three last July, but his insides were never quite so abused as this.  

I feel, though, that he was so blessed to have his kidney stones a couple of months ago so that Dr. Daniel Hibbert, a 6 ft. 9 in. giant could check out his prostate and PSA count and find that Carl indeed did have prostate cancer.  It’s just a little like my brother, Brent having kidney stones about this time last year and finding he had kidney cancer.  I think it’s God’s way of putting on a little sticky note to say “I don’t want you home quite yet.  Do something now right about right here.”  

Thank you, God, for both of them.

But there are some inconveniences.  

As I said in a previous blog, Carl doesn’t swear, but he does get to wear a little catheter bag for a couple of weeks and he almost cussed out the length of tubing, clamps and bag as he tried to figure the whole mess out his first day with it at home.  I wasn’t laughing to be sure as he commented that anyone who thinks catheters are funny doesn’t know what funny is.  It’s not that we think they’re funny.  We just are mighty glad it’s not us.  He's more used to it now, but he still doesn't like it.  

He hurts pretty bad still.  Not as bad as he did yesterday and not as bad as he did the days before.  I presume tomorrow will be even better.  

His surgery was the robotic laproscopic prostectomy which is much less common than the usual wide open hands-on job, but has far less hacking and hewing on the outside and is far more precise on the inside, but it still requires lots of cutting through the muscles of the stomach and still hurts like a son-of-a-gun.  

He will have a total of two weeks with the catheter and some recovery besides, including another four weeks of getting better and better, according to the good Dr. Hibbert and then after that he should feel pretty good.  Who knows how long before he's "back to normal" whatever that is.

I did mention to Dr. Hibbert that a "Dr. Hibbert" is also on the Simpsons and wondered if he gets teased a lot.  He said that those in the circles he travels in don’t watch the Simpsons much.  What?  You’d think patients of Urologists would gravitate right to the Simpsons.  I’ll let you provide the punchline yourselves.