Life !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well life can certainly throw things at you that you never expect.

The current situation is that my husband is in hospital having undergone an operation last night for an infection in the hip joint.

It was a bit of a surprise. It started with a bit of pain and stiffness on Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday he went to the doctor who diagnosed bursitis and gave him a referral for an x-ray which he was going to get on Friday.

However, by 5am Friday morning the pain was so bad that he had me take him to the nearest emergency department. He was in emergency most of the day. They did an x-ray, CT scan and sent him home late afternoon with some panadine forte and anti-inflamatories. The x-ray had shown a bone spur and some osteo-arthritis.

By 3am Saturday he was back in the emergency department and then admitted to the hospital on a cocktail of drug medication (methadone / oxycontin) and antibiotics as they suspected an infection. They did a biopsy on Monday and the results of this came back Tuesday morning showing an infection.

He was then transferred from our local hospital to Fremantle hospital (about an hour's drive away). Interesting enough, transfers from one hospital to another have to go through the emergency department at the receiving hospital.

He was originally scheduled to go by ambulance at 11am, he eventually got one at 4pm. He was in the emergency department for about 30mins before being seen by a doctor who was a bit put out that he had had some cheese and biscuits at 2pm as they decided they wanted to operate pretty much straight away.

Prior to admitting him to a ward they did a chest x-ray and an ECG, apparently both "routine for a preoperative patient in this age group". Neither showed anything to be concerned about.

However, due to the amount of arthritis the doctor was talking about not just flushing out the infection (and packing the area with antibiotics) but removing the femoral head and putting in a spacer as a pre-cursor to a hip replacement. We expressed our preference for just the wash-out.

I ended up leaving the hospital about 7.45pm as I had "farmed out" the girls and wanted to get back to them and, at that stage, they hadn't decided if they would operate then or the next day. At 8pm I had a call from him telling me that they were taking him to theatre.

I had been told that I could expect the operation and recovery to last a minimum of 2 hours, so my plan was to check on the girls, ring the hospital and go back when he got out of surgery. I rang at 10pm to be told that he was still in surgery. I rang at 11pm to be told that he was still not back at the ward (they prefer family to wait until the patient is back on the ward before visiting). The hospital then offered to ring me when he got back ... the next three hours, to put it mildly, were stressful. I finally got a message just after 2am that we was out of surgery and "ok".

I went to see him this morning, he's actually looking better but was very tired. They've put a radioactive dye in to see if there's any other "hotspots" of infection in about 48 hours. However, when I went back this evening he was looking flushed, was in pain and was running a fever. So it might be that they've not got all the infection.

It is inconvenient that he is in Fremantle hospital, rather than the local one, but apparently that one is best set up for surgery and has good osteo-surgeons on staff.

So anyway, that's the situation to date. Please keep him in your thoughts and prayers.