Milestones - Update 9 on Dad

Its been a busy couple of weeks... I think I'm back on top of things at work so I'm now tackling an update on dad.

He had two appointments last week; one with the surgeon and the other with the infectious disease doctor. The surgeon was very frustrated to learn the details of what had happened with the surgery. He's been performing these surgeries for 6 years and dad's is only the 4th case with infection. (In my book, that's a great track record.) That's the good news. The bad news is that, of the other 3 cases of infection, only 1 was due to infection being "carried in." The other 2 cases were due to infected hardware or sutures used to repair the rotator cuff, requiring complete replacement and a second rotator cuff surgery.

We won't know what type of infection dad has until he's off the antibiotics. Typically, he would have several weeks of the IV antibiotics and then several months of pill antibiotics. With the possibility of a second surgery looming, dad and his infectious disease doctor have decided to keep him on the pill antibiotic until a time when it would be more convenient to do another surgery - aka after bike and hunting seasons.

There are other good things that came of his appointment with the infectious disease doctor. Number one is a more aggressive treatment of the infection. The CO doctors put him on 500 mg dosage of the IV antibiotic. His new doctor has upped that to 800 mg. This will cut his total IV time from 6-10 weeks to 4-6. Also, instead of dad having to run into Grand Rapids weekly to change the dressing and port on his pic line and check his bacteria levels, he now has a nurse that comes weekly to the house to do all of that.

As to the title of this post, Monday dad will be returning to work. Yay!! Huge milestone. The doctor has signed off on him driving himself so for the last week he's been working on the details of that (similar to the special tools and tricks he had following the motorcycle accident). As of Wednesday, his pain level was decreasing and the evening chills have all but disappeared. He's been working all week to prepare himself for sitting at a desk all day by working at their home computer and tackling little projects around the house as well. Dad's not one to sit around so he's more than ready to get out of the house.

Praises - continued healing, ability to go back to work (this is a selfish praise for me as well as I don't realize how reliant I am on him here until he's not a part of my "team")

Prayers - continued healing, no recurrence of the staph infection once he's finished with the antibiotics, clarity of thought as he returns to work, safety driving