1st Post Op Visit...

Thank God the weather was agreeable for the 1 1/2 hour drive to Syracuse today for Becky's first post-op visit. The roads had all been well cleared from the first major storm and we made it in our usual time.

Dr. Dhawan was very pleased with how well she is doing and impressed with the speed and manner in which she is walking. He was sufficiently satisfied with the healing of her incisions after 11 days so he removed the staples from the front as well as the back. She now has steri-strips for the next week.

Dr. D did a series of evaluative tests to determine how well she is doing, due to the fact that she is having a great deal of pain in her legs. He has ruled out blood clots as the pain is bilateral (both legs equally). Her strength in her legs is excellent. He believes that the pain is due to the fact that a great deal of muscle was cut and the vertebrae have finally been repaired and placed in their proper position so that she now is standing more erect than she has for years. Therefore, the muscles are not accustomed to being stretched to this new height and are thus being stressed. He wants her to walk in place on her toes and heels 10 times each 10 times a day to stretch out the muscles.

Dr. D told her that he would like her to be down to 2 pain pills a day in 6 weeks. She plans to be off them in a week or two. She is basically down to 5 pills a day now. He gave her another scrip for Ambien as she does not sleep well yet without it. He has put her on one adult aspirin a day to aid in the prevention of blood clots. And he also wants her on a daily multi-vitamin along with a high protein diet. He wants her to make sure she does not put on weight during this healing period.

She is restricted to walking for the first 6 weeks and is not to do much else. She is not allowed to go into a bathtub, hot tub, pool, sauna, etc. for 3-4 months. She is not to use a treadmill for 4-5 weeks and then not until she sees Dr. D again and speaks to him about it. She is not to walk outside due to the weather and hazards that come along with it. Becky is not to push or pull more than 5 pounds. She is not allowed to lift things.

Dr. D would like to see Becky 6 weeks from her surgery which will be preceeded by an x-ray which she will bring to his office at that time to determine the extent of the healing.

Dr. Dhawan is an incredible man/surgeon. He has given Becky his cell phone number, home phone number, work phone number, pager number, his wife's name and phone number, and now his email address as he will be in Hong Kong from December 28-January 12. He has told her that she may call/contact him any time of the day or night. He says: "I do not want to find out at a later time something that I would have liked to know sooner." He has incredible moral values. He has faith in God. He has been getting a lot of grief from the orthopedic group in Watertown regarding Becky and her case as Becky dismissed Dr. Baird of the Watertown group from this team surgery. Dr. Baird is saying that Dr. D convinced Becky to drop him from the case by bad mouthing him to Becky. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, Dr. Baird had bad mouthed Dr. D and Dr. Winfield (who is supposedly a good friend of Dr. Baird) to Becky before she went for her first consultation with them in Syracuse by saying that they had bad bedside manners and she would not like them. Dr. D says he can take the flack as he knows he did nothing wrong and said nothing wrong and did only what was in the best interest of Becky. He says he often gets to clean up what their group has messed up with their patients. He actually said to Becky: "You are such a nice person, but others would sue Dr. Baird and they would win hands down."

According to Becky, she asked Dr. Baird right after her first surgery when he brought in the x-rays for her to see whether what she was seeing was supposed to be like that. He said yes that it was exactly what it should be--even though Becky didn't think things looked right to her untrained eye from the beginning. Dr. Baird actually has admitted to Becky that things were not right in the first surgery. Now he has said to her that the hardware could not have been secure or the screws in her back would not have broken (3 of 4). He has also apparently said to her that one of the screws was either pushing against or penetrated a nerve, which was why she suffered so much pain and has had numbness and weakness of her left leg since.

On the Sunday following Becky's Thursday surgery, Dr. D took Ray and I back behind the nurses and station and using the computer showed us x-rays of the entire procedure from beginning to end. He told us then that the timing of the healing of the bone graft and the hardware is critical, and you cannot have healing of the bone graft if the hardware is not secure. He believes Dr. Baird did wrong by Becky and based on the symptoms she complained of having after the first surgery she should have been taken back into surgery immediately and had those wrongs corrected.

So, Becky is progressing well. She has her good days and her bad. She has her ups and her downs. She is so anxious to heal and get better so she can be the mother she wants to be to these four wonderful children she is raising. That will be her greatest Joy for 2008. Please continue to pray for Becky Joy for strength and healing along with the patience it will require to be down for the next 3 months to recover.