I just talked to the surgeon. He said it was worse than he expected. He says Karen's mesh had torn free of the muscle and they had to redo the whole thing. He said add to that the fact that she has so few platelets to cause clotting, and it was a difficult surgery for her. She'll probably be groggy for the rest of the evening as she recovers from the surgery. They put a much larger mesh in this time, so there will be more give. So if she heaves or vomits now it will stand a much better chance of staying in place. The downside to a larger mesh is one side of her abdomen will have a bit of a bulge. The doctor says it's something she'll just have to get use to, and that it's still an improvement over an ostomy.
I remember Karen saying she felt something pop that first day after surgery when she was heaving. There wasn't any pain involved so the nurse wrote it off as the constricting band slipping or popping open, as it's held together with velcro. In hindsight I guess we should have insisted we talk to a doctor about it. There still would have been another surgery, but there wouldn't have been so much pain in between. As far as the surgery goes there's really nothing the surgeon could have done differently, they don't usually use a larger mesh for cosmetic reasons. If they had given her more platelets from the start and she had clotted right away, the mesh would have just healed out of place and she still would have required another surgery to fix it.
