Feeling SO MUCH better...

One of my (Niels) favorite shows for a long time was 'House' on Fox. It's about this gimpy, grumpy doctor that leads a team of diagnosticians. Today I felt like I was the husband for a patient on that show. Jen was getting worse and worse and nothing seems to help. She had a CT scan, 2 MRI's, a number of drugs, but in the end she was still regressing. She was loosing more and more functions and in a LOT of pain.

That was BEFORE 8pm...

It was a little after 8pm, after the latest OB doctor and the neurologist on-call left that we started working on trying to find the most comfortable position. To make a long story short, we found one. Ironically, it involved a cheap cardbox box that Mom brought over earlier today. We lowered the head-part of the bed and put her legs on the box. Jen wanted to do try some techniques she learned from her good friend Jen Vv whilst working on a previous health issue. The technique called bio-feedback lets you focus on relaxing particular muscles that are - in this case involuntarily - cramping up. If you don't conciencusly work and focus on them you'd never know they are cramping up.

Once we got her legs resting on the box we focused on her legs and literally within minutes we started to see results (helped by switching her pain meds from morfine to percacet). We figured that with previous similar issues Jen seems immune to morfine. First we repositioned her legs and worked with her knees until she was able to actively relax them. After that she started to have good movement in her arms again and we did a few abdominal exercises. She also tolerated those extremely well. She was able to completely lift her buttocks off the bed - pretty good for 4 days post op c-section - and we knew we struck gold. Little by little all her functions started to come back.

It is absolutely amazing - you can call it miraculeus - to see how fast after we put her legs on a cardbox everything started to come back. Can you believe it, a couple multi-thousand dollar tests and drugs... nothing. A $1 cardbox and 30 minutes of leg exercises and... voila. Most issues resolved.

The downside of the whole MRI thing is that now - due to the radioactivity - we can't breastfeed Daniel for 24 hours. Fortunately, we had enough breastmilk in storage from previous pumping sessions for 2 more feedings, but he'll need 3 or 4 formula feedings tomorrow. Ah well, better a little bit of formula than a radioactive kid... ;-)

We're going to settle down and get ready for bed with a very good change of a discharge tomorrow! We never thought that would be possible around 2pm. What a difference 6 hours and a large group of people praying can make.

Good night / Welterusten