This question seems more important to answer than going back and hashing out every detail of his hospital stay. We’ll get there. But let’s talk about the present.
How is Brady?
He’s managing pretty well. Its a very different recovery than the last one. It has only been a couple of days, but these are the things I can tell you to give you an easy picture.
After the last brain surgery, most of the surgical area was numb for a long time, which meant less pain. This time around, Brady has more pain. His incision site isn’t too bad anymore. The area where they screw his head in place during surgery was very sore but its begun to lift as well. But his brain itself aches quite a bit. This surgery was deeper and larger than the last one. His tumour was in the same place, but it had extended further back. Therefore the surgeon extended the incision further back and did more work back there. So, unlike last time, pain management is a bigger part of this recovery.
With Bradys higher level of pain comes a higher dose of pain medication. Which makes total sense. We are nicely on top of it and his pain is well managed.
With his higher dose of pain medication comes more fatigue. Which is great because sleep is essential to healing. But its also challenging because he has less mobility than he did during his past surgery. He is very tired which doesn’t make moving around easy. So for the time being, he’s needing more help with basic life things, and thats ok with me 💜 If I wasn’t willing to help him with basic day things, he’d still be at the hospital.
So.
Pain = meds.
Meds = drowsy.
Drowsy = extra needs.
Makes sense, right?
Another challenge that we weren’t expecting (though wasn’t altogether surprising) was that Brady had some stroke activity show up on his MRI from Friday morning. From that, Brady’s left side is giving him some trouble. Thankfully, we have already seen improvement, but it will likely be a bit of a road to recovery. His left hand is very delayed to respond. He has lots of weakness in his left arm. Therefore his balance is quite off. Wheeling his chair is hard. Sitting up for any length of time is hard. The left side is just unreliable. His speech is a little garbled, but some of that is also from fatigue. Dry mouth. Pain from intubation. All that good stuff.
This all being said! His speech is better than it was a couple of days ago, and he is having more success using his left hand. He can unlock the left brake on his wheelchair 🙂 That counts as a win!
If you are trying to text him, thats lovely! I’m going to advocate for him a little bit, though, and just let everyone know that texting back is hard. Surgery did not improve Brady’s vision. He has lost everything left of centre in his right eye, and with that, his eyes are having to learn how to refocus. He still works very hard to focus on things like his phone. Also, his dexterity isn’t great. His left hand is unhelpful and his right hand is very shaky. So you can text him and he can read it! But he may not text back. If he texts back, it might be short. Or garbled. Its not personal. Just go with it 😅 We’re just working with what we’ve got.
Brady wanted to get up and see everyone this morning 💜 Even though it took a lot out of him, he knew it would be good for the kids, and for me, and for himself to be up and around a little bit. Smell the rain. Reconnect a bit. Stretch those muscles for those minutes he could. It meant a lot to all of us.
If you have a question, please ask me! I know I’m awful for responding to comments, especially now 😬 but if you want to know something, you can ask and I’ll very likely answer it in another blog! There’s just SO much to talk about but I doubt it’ll all make it on here. So don’t hesitate to ask 💜
We all remain SO grateful to have Brady home with us. Thank you LORD!!!
💜
A quick aside. This weekend is the weekend when Kinsmen meets to discuss all of their applications. We applied for something quite expensive but that is very much a need. Please say a prayer that the hearts of the board members of Kinsmen Telemiracle would be moved to help Brady and our family.