Serious, scary shit

Hello all,
I've posted pretty regularly in the year and half since I got the band and then -poof!- disappear for over a month.  Miss me?  Worry about me?  Well, you should worry - there's been some scary shit going on in my life.  My husband nearly died.  no joke. no laughing matter. no shit.

I'm sure this will take a couple posts to get fully caught up so lets get it going.....

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my husband has been having headaches since about Easter.  These headaches are positional which means they are a little better when he's laying down & much worse when he's upright.  Turns out these headaches are caused by leaking spinal fluid.  Over the course of a few months, we got kicked from specialist to specialist, test to test & treatment to treatment.  Then things went to bad to worse to dire in just a few short days.

He was leaking so much fluid that his brain was scraping around inside his skull and it caused a subdural hematoma - or bleeding in the brain.   He was already in the hospital due to dehydration & for pain management and was scheduled for surgery to plug up the holes.  However, the afternoon before surgery, the doc came by on rounds and felt my husband was "sicker than he should be for this issue" and ordered a CT scan out of curiosity.  Thank goodness for his suspicions!   The operating plan quickly changed from plug the leak to drilling holes in skull to relieve the pressure and flush out the blood.  That morning before surgery, I could not rouse my husband at all.  Shaking him, yelling at him, slapping his face - none of it produced any response.  I do truly believe that if he hadn't already been in the hospital and that if the surgeon hadn't been suspicious, then he would have likely slipped into a coma that day and I'm not sure we would have gotten him back.  Also, its difficult to think what might have happened if they'd gone ahead and done the original procedure to open up his spine with an undetected brain bleed. <<insert panic here>>

That morning was probably the scariest of my life....and considering everything I've been through with my daughter that is saying a lot!  The anesthesiologist mentioned that this was the most unusual case he'd ever seen.  great.  As they were wheeling him off the operating room, the pre-op nurses started giving us hugs & I could the tears in their eyes.  wtf? <<insert panic here>>  After seeing that, I walked about 10 steps before completely melting down and falling to pieces.  I am never a mess & I rarely cry but in that moment I was a bawling disaster.  <<insert panic here>>

After brain surgery, he spent a few days in ICU where he was markedly better - although he did lose about 5 days. doesn't remember them at all but he was speaking & eating again.  One week after the dealing with the blood in his brain, he went back under so the docs could try to plug up the leaks.  Films had shown the leaks were really high up in his neck at C2-C3.  Doc opened him up there (yikes!) but couldn't actually find any holes or source of the leaks.  fuck. He went ahead & pumped him full of superglue as a shot in the dark.  Now we wait and see if that did any good...

gotta run but I'll post more tomorrow.
cheers,
chloe