The Second Day After Surgery

Here we are, the second day after Jess’s surgery on Monday to replace his knees. Thankfully, it’s a better day. With the low blood pressure, dizziness, nausea and whatnot, he was in pretty bad shape yesterday.

As the internist predicted would happen, Jess’s hematocrit was in the toilet this morning. In other words, the dipstick for those little red blood cells is showing a dramatic shortage. For probably the first time in his life, the lab techs were having trouble finding veins to draw blood samples. Because of all that, he’s already had one unit of blood, and the nurse is supposed to be bringing back a second unit. (In fact she should have been here some time ago…)

He also made it to group physical therapy/rehab twice, before and after the first unit of blood, and is doing really well there. He’s eating a little bit today, after two days of sucking on ice cubes and sipping water. His color has improved, and he just all around seems to be doing better. I suspect after the second unit of blood, he’ll improve even more. He just didn’t have enough blood circulating to do the job!

After giving us such a scare yesterday, it’s good to see him making forward progress today.