I am naturally an over-stressed person. So as soon as I found out that he has diverticulitis, I started researching on what he can and cannot eat. I started saying, "I don't think you should eat that..." or "Do you think you should eat that?" It's hard planning meals because he can't eat quite a bit of stuff. I normally use tomatoes A LOT when cooking so now that is something that has to be avoided. For a while, he couldn't eat bread, anything high fiber, and no fruits or vegetables. He pretty much lived on yogurt (and only 3 flavors) and tuna fish for lunch. He usually had soup for dinner if he had dinner at all. He recently made a comment about how I am always telling him what he can and cannot eat. When we discussed why he said that, he said he is just stressed out and worrying over the food he can and cannot eat. He doesn't mean to take it out on me, but since I am always borderline "nagging" him about it then naturally, I am the one who gets bitched at.
He has been really icky feeling lately. He has been really nauseous and had quite a bit of vomiting. That's how both of his hospital visits started: pain, discomfort, lack of sleep, numerous bathroom trips, and vomiting. So when he was up at 2am (and for the rest of the night/morning) throwing up, of course I assumed we were about to have another hospital stay. He ended up just battling through it. His surgery is on Thursday morning so he's just trying to make it through the next few days. The surgeon said that the operation should only take about 1.5-2 hours. If everything goes according to the plan, he will only have a stage 1 surgery. That means they will do the operation, he will spend 5 days in the hospital, and then go home to recover. He will be out of work for a minimum of 4 weeks. If he is healing well then he will go back to work.
If they get in there and he has an infection or any complications arise, then they will perform a stage 2 surgery. This means that they will remove the bad part of his colon, install a colostomy bag that he will have for 4 weeks, then go back in and repair his colon. If that's the case, he will be out of work for the 4 weeks then another 2-4 weeks for recovery after the 2nd part of the surgery. So of course we are hoping and praying for just a stage 1 surgery. We're really hoping that he is ONLY out of work for the minimum 4 weeks. I am not sure what we will do if it's any more than that.
We were talking to one of our neighbors last night who has also suffered from diverticulitis. She has had a colostomy bag for almost 10 months! At first, her surgeon told her 2 months! I don't know all of the details about why she has had it for so much longer than the original plan, but I hope that does not happen to Joey.
Joey doesn't have health insurance. So as of right now (before the surgery), his hospital bills are about $25,000. This includes his 4 day hospital stay, his 9 days of outpatient antibiotics, his 3 day hospital stay, and the various bills from outside providers such as radiology, gastro doctor, tissue samples, colonoscopy, etc. I have no Earthly idea how much his surgery and 5 day stay will cost us. Luckily, we applied for and received some aid through the hospital. It cut off a huge chunk of the medical bills, but we still owe a lot. His 4 day hospital stay went from about $18k to almost $12k. I found out that Texas had a Medically Needy Medicaid program that we should qualify for. We make too much for Medicaid, but the Medically Needy program should be able to help us out. I had to fill out a huge application and input each individual medical bill that we have received for the last 3 months. I even had to input every doctor's visit and how much we paid. We have a phone interview on Friday so I am hoping that we will get the ball rolling, get everything approved, and hopefully have his medical bills paid for. There's some stipulations to the program that involve paying a certain amount that we make over the Medicaid limit before the program will pay any of the bills. But I am not sure how all of it works just yet. I suppose I should be able to find out on Friday.
Needless to say for me stress=crappy eating and little exercise.
I got some gift cards and birthday money from Joey's family so I used some of it to get a couple new work out tops. I took the first step and brought all of my work out gear to work today and plan to go to the track right after work. I bought the foot pod to go with my Garmin a month or so ago and still haven't calibrated it. I plan to do that today. I am hoping that the weather stays as nice as it was this morning and yesterday! If so, it's perfect outside running weather.
If you don't hear from me for a few days, now you'll know why!
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