Ninety

Ninety.

Ninety degrees - the temperature for the past couple of days and the next several days. Too freaking hot for June if you ask me.

Ninety percent - the percent of stone that the doctor thinks he was able to remove today.

The surgery was several hours long, and as of this moment, I haven't gotten to see Vern since the surgery went so long and he was in recovery pretty late into the evening. However, I have spoken to him (if you could call it that - he was pretty drugged up and I doubt he'll remember) and also to the doctor. Vern will still be in the hospital for another day or two at least.

We won't know for sure what the status is until another CT scan is done of his kidney next week, but the doctor felt sure that the largest portion of the stone has been removed and that only a handful of stone remains. He said it was like nothing he has ever seen before.

At this point (at least the doctor's first impression before he sees the CT scan), this will probably end the attempts to remove the stone. He felt that Vern has been through enough (I believe he used the phrase that poor guy several times). There may be an effort to remove the remaining stone through less invasive measures later or he may just monitor it for a while. He's still going to need at least one more surgery to remove all of the hardware and tubes they had to leave in for safety reasons.

There are a few complications we are going to have to deal with, but since I don't know if Vern has been advised of those yet (and for sure he wasn't fully conscious if he was), I'll save those for another day.

But for now, we're going to call this one good news for a change.


Except, you know, for the part about the unending 90 degree days. That part sucks.