Long weekend for Grandpa

While Anna and I were in Morris, Grandpa stayed in the hospital. After we left on Thursday, he began bleeding again. Nothing serious at the time, just that he wasn't well enough to leave yet. He has some more transfusions. By Friday the Doctors were talking about surgery some more, but again, only if needed. Grandma had stopped bleeding again so things were again looking better. By Saturday things were still roller coastering with good and waiting to leave (silly homogloblens), so the doctors decided to o some scope work to look around. First they looked around his intestines and they all looked ok, so they went back in to look around the stomach, everything looked good there too. Their conclusion was that it had to be his diberticulitis. Come Sunday, his rollercoastering has meant he had had 11 transfusions. You can only have someone have 12 transfusions before the body begin to seriously reject the new blood. It was decided that on Sunday he'd go in for surgery. The surgery was slated to begin about 9am but that slowly crept back to about 10:45 or so. It was going to be a 3 hour surgery. While they were in fixing this problem they also decided to do some other things as well. He has had a hernia for 20+ years and his colostomy was difficult to maintain where it was. They decided to move and update is stoma, remove his fiscula, and remove his hernia (which was likely the cause the problems anyway).
Anna and I headed back to Eau Claire and got back about 4:30pm or so. We had thought we'd be back a couple hours after his surgery so that he'd be in the recovery room. We were surprised to find that he was still in surgery! Coincidently there was a major storm heading to Eau Claire as well. He finished surgery around 5pm or so. He was moved to a recovery room but because of the storm, and the hospital moving everyone from the rooms (avoiding windows), we didn;t get to see him in his room until about 8:30pm.
He was in alot of pain but was coherent. It was a long and tough 6 hour surgery. I'm 28 and 6 hours of surgery would be brutal for me, he's 80!
Late Sunday night/Monday morning, about 4am, he was moved from his regular room to critical care for closer monitoring. He's been making progress to recovery. He's coughing better and has been keaning up more (up to 25 degrees). The doctor stopped in and they're working to get him sitting up today or tomorrow.
He's still got a tremendous amount of pain and is fighting low blood pressure but is doing well. He's in good spirits, and is looking forward to his trip to Alaska with my cousin Johnny (who is graduating this weekend). He had one of the nurses talked into going too, until he told her she'd have to drain the sewer ;)