Well, well....where to begin?
I suppose we should backtrack a little and wish you all (all 2 of you who read this thing) a Merry Christmas. Our Xmas was interesting this year and it was not what we had planned.
We had planned to go back to Gettysburg for 2 weeks over the holidays to relax and enjoy the winterness of things, plus have time to be with family. Sounds nice and normal, right?
We had planned to leave on Friday, Dec 19th and were getting all set: changing class times, prepping tickets and gifts, taking care of Mocha, and making sure things would not be too out of whack in our house when we returned.
Well, as we say in our intro, there are detours along the way that we deal with. Here is the detour that we experienced:
On Sunday, Dec 14th, Jo was feeling worse and worse after trying to go to bed. She could not sleep and it hurt to breathe. We both thought it was due to her volatile first trimester, so we just tried to deal with it, but it was obvious that she was in pain. The next day, she felt a little better but we decided to see a Chinese medical doctor to make sure things were ok (Jo does not like to visit Western doctors, especially in Taiwan). After listening to Jo's pulse for a few seconds, the doctor basically said: "Your lung is not working right and if it is as bad as I think, you will need to go to the hospital." We were shocked by the seriousness of the statement and of his accuracy from just pulse reading. Jo quickly asked if he thought she could still go to the US in a few days and he said that if it was too serious, then that would be crazy.
So we made an appointment for Dec 16th to see a Western doctor at the China Medical University Hospital, where coincedentally, my previous student is now the director of the hospital. We naively thought we would be in and out of there in a few hours with nothing to fear since we were getting excited to leave for the US in 3 days.
We were told to get some xrays and did, even though we were worried about the fetus and when we saw the picture, our hearts sank while our mouths gaped open. We were supposed to be looking at Jo's left lung that would take up most of the xray picture, but what we saw was this tiny deflated balloon-like mass on the bottom of her lung cavity. Her lung had collapsed so no wonder she had trouble breathing. We stood shocked even after the doctor said we had to go to the emergency room right then to take care of this or else it would become even more serious.
We wandered in a daze to the ER and she was put on a stretcher and brought in for the other docs to look at. I was with her the whole time and scared *&^less while she was in pain and frightened as well.
They decided to to an operation right then to put a tube in her lung cavity to suck the air out that was pressing down on the collapsed lung. This procedure is fairly simple but Jo reminded everyone that she is pregnant and thus they did not administer too much anysthetic for her, which made the process agonizing. After this we were rushed to a proper bed in the hospital and were left trying to recover.
(Afterward we found out that this is called Spontaneous Pnumothorax, which usually happens in tall, thin, young, otherwise healthy and active men. Basically, a bubble forms between the lung and the lung membrane and pops, which deflates the lung. We think Jo had it since her morning sickness was also terrible with a lot of puking, so that may have created air bubbles and popped one. But no one really knows. We were just lucky that we did NOT get on a plane and have this happen in the air or in the US - without medical coverage. So in that way, we lucked out.)
Let me reiterate again: Jo is a tough cookie.
So after enduring 4 days of waiting to see if the air would be sucked out, another set of xrays showed that it did not work and that they would try another tube in another place to see if that would work. They did mention that they could just do surgery to help the lung, but again, we said we would try to do that since surgery and babies are not a good combination.
So he had another tube inserted in her lung cavity - this time a bigger one, and we waited for the results there as well. After a few days, we were again naively optimistic since we were constantly told that it was no big deal and that even though this was a shock, it should be relatively easy to fix - just rest and let the tube work. You can see this coming, right? After another xray, we were again disappointed to learn that her lung was only less than half reinflated, which was not good. There was something wrong and the doctor recommended surgery at this point.
After some discussion, we decided to have it done and on Christmas morning, Jo underwent an hour long surgery to manually pull the lung tissue back to its original place. So, we say that Jo got an Xmas lung this Christmas.
Everything went fine and we then had to wait 6 days in the hospital to rest and recover, so we ended up gettin gout of the hospital on Dec 31st, just in time for New Years. We did NOT want to have to spend any more time in that place!
So now, we are both relaxing and recooperating from the ordeal. Jo is feeling much better and able to finally move about much more (she was pretty much confined to the bed for the entire stay - mostly because it hurt so much to move around - it took her about 30 min to go from her bed to the bathroom about 5 feet away). It almost feels like we are back to normal, so that is great.
We would like to thank everyone who called, emailed or came by the hospital for your thoughts and prayers and really do appreciate it. There were indeed some rough times and knowing you were thinking of us helped.
So we are back now and going to have a great New Year of 2009.
Hope you do, too.
Jeff & Jo
