So, its almost a year later and, "I'm bbaaacccckkk!" And what a year; lost three of our four Pomeranians, and had our home broken into with thousands of dollars worth of belongings stolen. We just had a wildfire go ballistic five miles from our home in the forest, but the winds blew it the other way. So I choose to look at it like we had some major good luck blow our direction, for once, and we Andersons are still truckin' along! The second half of Voodoo Priestess won't be as detailed (or hopefully as long) because, though the account is quite bizarre it's also quite past history for me now, something I've worked hard to get beyond.
Leaving off with John recovering from his re-attachment surgery, four days after the surgery was the weekend, when John's regular surgeon was off-duty. The staff doctor heard some 'gurgling' sounds in John's intestines and decided to take out his stomach drain tube, but too soon. His intestines apparently went 'back to sleep,' which they can sometimes do. Within hours he had violent hiccups and began throwing up repeatedly. And his incision started draining out blood and fluid in increasing amounts as time went on. Monday morning at 3:30 am he called me frantically, asking me to come to the hospital and get him a doctor . . . he was dying and no one was helping him. He had been throwing up all night and the nurse would only give him a couple of Tums and refused to call a doctor. His sheets had needed to be changed twice that night because of the blood and fluid pouring out of his incision and onto the floor. In I ran, and once I got there the nurse assigned to John immediately called John's surgeon, who directed the drain tube to go back in. John balked over having this nurse do it, though. I turned to the nurse and apologized for his actions, telling her he was just so stressed over had had happened. She said it was okay. I calmed John down and with me beside him this nurse re-inserted the tube. Instantly John's hiccups and throwing up ceased, but he filled up three large containers with stomach acid from the tube in just a few minutes. I spoke with nurse "Marie" for a brief period before she got on with her duties, and found out she was from Haiti. She'd been in the U.S. for about twenty years and 'moved around a lot' when I asked her where all she'd lived. After she left the room John's eyes went round as saucers and he cursed, saying she was never to touch him again. I was dumbfounded at his reaction and asked him why?
He relayed to me the following: Before he called me he had been in more than one altercation with her that night, begging her to call a doctor for him; any doctor on call that night would be fine. He needed help. Her last answer was: 'No, I won't. But you need to call everyone you know, friends and family, and get them to pray for you! For you have an evil spirit visiting upon you that means to do you harm, maybe kill you!"
Needless to say I was in shock when John told me that. This is the 21st century and we live in a modern civilized country with civilized doctors and nurses, so I'd thought. I reported her actions to hospital management, who were equally as shocked. Neither John nor I ever saw her again after that.
When John's surgeon appeared days later to inspect his incision, I voiced my concerns over the large amount of fluids still draining from it, which seemed to irritate him. He took staple cutters and opened up John's wound to the size of a salad plate, mumbling he wanted to make sure there was no infection going on. There wasn't, but what there was, come to find out a couple of months later, was a complete hernia of his abdominal wall, from all the vomiting he did. The inner incision of his abdominal muscles had ripped totally apart. We found this out on February 20th when John sneezed after eating his breakfast and his intestines blew out the front of his healed-up incision because there was no abdominal muscle to hold them in. Three big holes in his intestines. His entire breakfast dumped out on a towel. Just like that he had to be put on a TPN line for four months; no eating until his intestines had time to really heal this go-around.
The TPN line failed twice in that time, causing severe blood infections that landed him in ICU for days, the sugar in the fluids gave him temporary diabetes as well as gall-bladder attacks. John's final re-attachment surgery (at a different hospital and under a different surgeon) happened on Monday, June 6th, 2011, and it worked! Heart-breakingly I had to put my favorite Pom to sleep the Friday before that, but in all, now that we've known two people since then who had intestinal complications and died from their surgeries, I can look back on the experience and say that, despite the 'Voodoo Priestess' and all else that happened, John was lucky. Our family was lucky. It's all in how you look at it! Bye for now, all.
