Friday

Steph was doing pretty good this morning. Pain in check and no nausea. Then I took her for a little walk and she took a shower. After her shower she got really sick. The headache also started to return. She was mostly sleeping or trying to sleep all day. If her head got better then she felt like throwing up. Which she did only once while the nurse was trying to talk to us about what time we thought we would leave. That was about 11 or Noon. Even with alternating pain meds she was really uncomfortable/dizzy.
I was expecting her to be a lot better by the time they send a patient like her home. The doctors all said that she will be dizzy and sick when she came home but I was thinking she would be able to function. If we do anything it is so debilitating to the point that if feels like the workout wasn't worth it. She laid in bed today writhing in pain from 9ish to 4 after one lap around the nurses station and a shower. That doesn't feel like she is progressing at all. It's depressing. She was doing so well on Wednesday. She deserves another Wednesday.
She slept for a little in the afternoon and woke up at 3:50 for her meds. She said she felt good enough to come home after we talked about maybe just staying one more night. I asked the nurse if she thought Steph was good enough to come home. The nurse said that there were a couple other people that had that same surgery that went home today feeling just like Steph, and that it was a pretty normal condition for Steph to be in from her experience. Steph and I decided that she could be sick at home but at least she was home.
On the plus side, now Steph can be just a few feet away on the couch while I make meals. Now I don't have to worry about leaving her while she isn't feeling good to go all the way to the cafeteria for meals. I skipped a bunch of meals this week because she just wasn't doing well enough to leave her alone. I should have brought more granola bars! if I did go get a meal it had to be when there wasn't any meds due, because they would often forget and let her go without for a little while. I had to also make sure that I had already fed Steph. She couldn't feed herself and I don't know if the nurses do, or have time to do, that kind of thing. I didn't feel like I could just leave her with the nurses. They weren't that involved and Steph probably wouldn't ask for help if she needed it. If she was going to throw up there is no way the nurse would have made it in time to hand her the bag. Little things like that kept me from leaving her alone. They probably just didn't worry about her as much since I was there all the time. Shot myself in the foot on that one.
We made it home at about 5. The kids were so happy to see her. They made some get well posters with grandma that were hanging around the house. They were so sweet and gentle with her. They would grab her hand and hold it or rub her hand on their cheek.
Steph is happy to be home but she is pretty beat up from all the driving. She describes the pain in her head as a thousand pounds of pressure behind her ear and around her forehead. I wish there was something better we could do but the Doctors all said the best thing is just to keep getting her up and eventually the brain will start figuring things out and the left side will compensate.
The docs said that from now on she will still get more dizzy than normal when she does certain things like stand up to fast or spin around to look at something. Dr. Reichman, who had this same surgery when he was younger, also said that when it is dark it will really give Steph vertigo. Before the surgery she mentioned that when she would wake up in the middle of the night to check on the kids she would often stumble or have to grab the wall to balance herself. She didn't realize why until Dr Reichman mentioned that. She has already been dealing with a few of the side effects since the tumor was effecting the nerves that control those things.
The long term effects of being deaf on the left side is that she won't be able to tell what direction sounds are coming from without a special kind of hearing aid. On Thursday she asked me why she could hear people talking outside her hospital window. She was laying on the bed with her eyes closed with her left (good) ear facing the window. I told her that the nurses were talking outside her door, that was on her right. It was a surprise to her how she could really not tell where the sound was coming from. She also has a hard time now picking certain noises out of a noisy room. Like one person talking to her in a group of noisy people. I think birthday parties are going to be overwhelming at first. She was already having trouble talking to people in that situation when she still had some hearing on the right. She is tough though and will figure it out. I told her I would make shirts that say "speak up into my left ear" but she didn't want any.