I'm Spleenless and Loving It!

I'm back home now and decided I should put up a quick update on my surgery!

First of all, I didn't die during it (obviously). The surgery itself went well and my surgeon did a great job of sucking my spleen out of me. Thank you to everyone that visited me while in the hospital...that meant a lot to me and I'm sorry to anyone who had to watch me dry heave or throw up while you were there since my stomach was extremely nauseous and I couldn't even keep down water! I left the hospital on Friday morning and am still recovering at home. The small holes where they cut into me hurt a bit still especially when I turn over or bend over. I have a headache quite often which is annoying because I never get headaches, but I'm taking some strong drugs for that. I feel ok most of the time, but if I go out and about for more than an hour I feel pretty tired. It will be a long time until I play soccer again.

The one thing that didn't feel or look so right after the surgery was my eyes. If you have seen me lately you would think I was demon possessed as my eyes are puffy and VERY bloodshot. When I open my eyes up wide it looks pretty scary. Last night I looked in the mirror at them and saw that my eyes were turning a little yellowish in places along with the red. I immediately figured this was bruising and was a little worried...I don't mind bruising but I don't want to be messing around with my eyes.

So I told Shiela I wanted to go in to Emergency to get it checked out and speak to the Hemotologist on duty. So we headed on down there at 10:00pm. To make a long story short, the ER doctor said the bloodshot eyes and puffiness was just a result of the surgery. It could have been caused by the pressure that was put on my eyes during the surgery (they taped my eyes shut while I was unconscious) or any other type of pressure. He said the yellow in the eye was a good thing because it meant the eye was healing and the body was reabsorbing (or something like that) the blood back into the system. So all in all I was fine, but just to make sure they wanted to take my blood for a platelet count.

And this is where it gets good. My platelet count has been stable around 50,000 but that was on 15mg of Prednisone. Right after the surgery my platelet count went up to 88,000 which was a good sign. But last night, 3 days after my surgery, the doctor said my platelet count was up to 331,000! I can't remember it ever being that high, even after going to get IV gamma globulin done for three days.

So praise the Lord that it appears so far he has healed me through this surgery! I am still on some Prednisone but over the next few weeks I will be lowering the dose until I am off completely. Thank you to everyone for your prayers as God has definately answered them by healing me so far!