A few struggles in healing - 1 week after surgery

Yesterday afternoon began a rough patch in Mom's healing. She noticed that she was getting a fever and chills. I got on the phone immediately and called her visiting nurse who happens to live right here in Fillmore. She said that because her fever was 101.5 degrees that she was supposed to recommend we go to the emergency room, but she also recommended that we call the Doctors at the City of Hope to see what they thought. I called them and they recommended a few great pieces of advice. Mom is already on a high dose of Ibuprofen for her inflammation which we just stepped up a bit to help combat the fever, PLUS they recommended drinking LOTS of ice water. The COH nurse also recommended for Mom to get up and walk around a lot and continue with her deep breathing exercises and coughing. Many times with lung issues like she's had, it helps to cough and breath deeply to get rid of the left over anesthesia and whatever else might be lurking in her lungs.

All of these things seemed to help, but not tremendously. I ended up calling the COH triage nurses again at about 10PM because she still was battling a low grade fever and it had never completely gone away for many hours...by 10PM she had a fever for approximately 5 hours. Mom's Surgical Oncologist gave her a call and went through a number of questions with Mom to rule out any serious issues and encouraged her to sit up more in the day, and gave Mom her cell phone number just incase she had any more questions or problems (Did I mention I love her Dr?). The last call we had for the evening was from the Triage nurse around midnight, just checking in and seeing if everything was ok. I was home by then and had just left Mom sitting up at her computer with her fever almost completely gone. She wanted to wait up until midnight to take her pain meds before going to bed. Thankfully, her fever did break right around midnight about 6 hours after it first came on.

I spoke with her a few minutes ago, and she's feeling good today...no more fever. She is having a lot of muscle pain in her chest and back because of all of the placements being different from surgery. She experienced severe pain yesterday on her left side, and today it seems to be more painful on the right. We are excited that her visiting nurse will be here to check her out today.

Sorry I haven't updated very much lately, but Mom is keeping me on my toes. She said for the first several days that I was only off duty when her eyes were closed. HAHAHA! That's pretty much how it really was. :) She's letting up a bit now because she is starting to be able to get in and out of bed on her own. This is the first day my laptop has been out of the bag in almost a week. I'll try to be better about writing, k?

:)