It’s Travis here, back for a guest appearance while Nikki is on the heavy meds.  

The day didn’t get off to the greatest start.  Since Nikki has had so many IV medication treatments throughout the years, most of her veins are SHOT!  She has no visible veins at the surface of her skin which makes it very difficult to thread an IV.  They needed to get a PICC line placed so the lab could do blood work and they could administer the anesthesia to knock her out.  The usual workaround is that they need to call up the Vascular Access team which brings an ultrasound machine.  With this, they can normally find a deeper subcutaneous vein to place the line.

As Nikki’s luck would have it, they were short staffed today.  She was told they couldn’t wait for Vascular Access as the entire surgical team was ready to go. After getting poked in her arm without success, they brought in the first anesthesiologist to try to thread a line in her foot.  These guys are good.  With diabetics, it’s generally not advised to use the feet for drawing blood let alone administering medication via a larger, more invasive IV needle.  A diabetic’s blood vessels at their extremities are smaller and more fragile and don’t provide the blood flow that most people are privileged to experience. But they needed to get her into surgery and they needed to place the IV.

The first anesthesiologist failed.  And so did the second.  Getting poked in the foot involves a lot of pain.  Especially when the needles are a little bit larger and they are so near the surface of the skin where there are more nerve endings.  We’re not talking about a pin prick here.  They need to burrow into a tiny vein.  Nikki normally handles this well.  But after a few sticks, the tears were flowing and she needed to call it off.  The anesthesiologist was disappointed he couldn’t get it done and she was pretty upset.  This was not how the day was supposed to begin.

So they needed to call in Vascular Access after all.  They were now behind schedule. With the entire surgical team waiting, they called in a guy from the bench. Actually, he normally does administrative work for the team, but Scott was a very worthy pinch hitter. He had the line threaded in a few minutes and the anesthesiologists came back to whisk her off to surgery. The smiles were back as she was happy this obstacle was now behind her.  Knowing she would be going into surgery in a much better frame of mind was good for all of us.

After a little over two hours in the operating room, Dr. Molina came out to let us know everything went well. They removed the rib along with the muscle and tissue around it.  There will be a drain placed in her chest to remove the fluid that is accumulating.  She was on her way to the recovery room.  From there, she will go to X-Ray and then they’ll place the stent.

And we will begin the wait for the next update.

Thank you all for the messages, thoughts and prayers.

Will post again later today.