From Rollercoaster to Marathon

dkhuffma
Dec 18, 2023
2 min read

Mercy has her second exploratory bowel surgery tomorrow around 2 pm. The first surgery was laparoscopic; this surgery will be a much larger cut and require a longer recovery time. If you're able, we'd love prayers for her surgery!!

The best-case scenario is if surgeons manage to find a mechanical issue in her small intestine - such as a narrowing or a stricture - that the first surgery missed, they fix the issue, and then Mercy recovers over the next three months.

A scarier scenario is if they do the surgery and don’t find any mechanical issues. This would mean her problem is likely functional. Functional issues can take a long, long time to address - we’d expect to be in the hospital through next summer. If it is a functional issue, they’ll give her an ileostomy bag to help reduce the burden on her small intestine. She’d likely have it for a couple of years.

Tomorrow is scary, but we’re at the point where the path ahead looks like less of a roller coaster and more of an endurance test. I don’t wake up worried about her not making it through the night like I did a few months ago, but I also don’t hold hope that she’ll be out of Lurie Children’s before Easter.

We’re honestly struggling to adjust to this semi-permanent phase, where one parent is at Lurie with Mercy for several nights and the other parent is at home with our four other boys. The distance has created logistical challenges. It’s wearing us out. Pray for endurance for us. It’s gonna be long.

In the meantime, here are some awesome pics of Mercy over the past few days: