Final Surgery?!

Ben had his surgery last Friday, January 27th. I meant to update this sooner, but things have been a little crazy. We had to be up at the hospital at 530 am. Yuck! He was the first case, which was nice. But like everything else when it comes to his medical care, nothing can go as planned. The plan was to just go in, move the leads back down into place, and be done. Hahaha! They spent an hour just trying to get the leads, which they couldn't. So they ended up taking the whole unit out (leads and battery pack), replacing one of the leads, and then putting them all back in. So what was supposed to be an hour surgery, actually ended up being three hours. The good news is he didn't stop breathing this time! But he was in a lot more pain. They gave him about double the local anesthetic they usually use and he was still hurting. On the upside though, because he wasn't so out of it, they were able to get the leads in a really good spot. As the doctor was saying at his follow up appointment the other day, he has a very small window where he gets the coverage he needs. Even a tiny bit higher or lower, he doesn't get the same relief. So they got the leads positioned, and he's getting great coverage now. The pain isn't completely gone, but it's better than it was even after the last surgery. He's still hurting, but most of the pain is just the post-op pain right now. We are now working on getting him off the narcotics. He's been taking dilaudid and morphine since before Christmas, so we are slowly cutting back on them. No one wants to be on that stuff anyway, and in the long run they can actually make the pain worse because the body just needs more of it. So we are getting away from those, and then we'll start working on getting him off all the other pills he's on. He takes like 7 different pills right now. It's going to be a long slow process because some of them have some nasty withdrawal side effects, but we'll do what it takes.
So all in all things are starting to look up a little bit. The big thing now is just making sure he takes it easy for the next little while and takes the time to heal so the leads don't move again. We are looking at starting the whole med board process in March. We could probably start it a bit sooner, but we're going to wait a little bit so that we can take some leave and go home for a bit. Because once the process starts, we won't be able to take leave. And it's definitely time for a vacation. And as long as the commander approves Ben's leave, we'll be home for about 3 weeks in March. Yay!