Kim is recovering quite nicely from her surgery. All the doctors and nurses are surprised at how well she’s looking and recovering.

Yesterday she was fully alert, but was still having a lot of back pain, plus her incision was starting to hurt. She was also getting some occassional nausous feelings. She started to walk yesterday evening and her doctors want her to walk at least 5 times a day. She needs to do deep breathing to avoid pneumonia. She has this little plastic device that she can breath through to help with that. IT’s more of an indicator device that helps her know that she is taking a deep breath, holding it, and then exhaling.

Today she has made even more progress. I saw her this morning, and except for the fact that she was lying in a hospital bed, you would be hard pressed to know that she just had major abdominal surgeyr less than 48 hours ago.

Her back pain is starting to recede and she is even more alert and cheerful. Her bandage was removed so that the incision can get some air to help it heal faster. Her doctors are going to start her on one liquid food to see how she handles it and to try and get her bowels working again. If she handles that OK, she may start to get more and more food. One of her IVs was removed and her catheter will be removed today. That would make it much easier to move around as she’ll only have the single IV that is in her neck.

The surgeon confirmed that her lymph nodes are a bit swollen, but he mentioned that it could just be inflammed as opposed to the cancer spreading there. This is an important distinction as it would determine if Kim has stage II or stage III cancer. We’ll know definitely once the pathology results are back. Hopefully, we should have that on Thursday. This would dictate if additonal treatments like chemotherapy or radiation are necessary.

Based on the progress Kim is making and the feedback from the doctors and nurses, it is very likely that Kim’s hospital stay might on the short side. Originally, the surgeon said she should expect to stay 5-7 days. Maybe she could be home in 5 days as opposed to the 7 days at the end of the estimate. Kim has always been a very quick healer and this appears to be no different.