We feel like we lost 5 days!  But really, it feels like one long day that has lasted a year!

The good news first: Jacob finally had surgery to fuse his C-5 vertebra to C-4 and C-6 to stabilize everything.  It was successful and he is slowly recovering.  He was able to get out of bed today and sit up for most of the afternoon as well as take his first walk around the nurse’s station.

It’s impossible to go back and recover all the drama involved in getting Jacob to the OR, but we finally managed to get him there at 5:30 p.m. Thursday evening!  The lack of communication in the whole hospital system is a nightmare and he kept getting moved from “first thing in the morning” to “sometime today, we hope.”  And there was much excusing and blaming and explaining who was at fault . . . until his mother responded with “I understand there are  difficult cases. I understand there are emergencies. But I want to know when my son gets to be the emergency.  He’s been in the hospital for two weeks tomorrow and nothing has happened to move him up the list?”  At the same time, his father was up in the Patient Advocate’s office and lining up the next course of action.

Well, miracles do happen as about thirty minutes later, Jacob got called to surgery. And the surgery that they told us would take about 2 hours, actually took 6.  Nothing was wrong . . . “The surgeons always underestimate their timing.”

So, at 11:30 p.m., the security guard in the waiting room called for “Mr. Andrew’s family.”  (That’s Jacob Andrew Borkowski . . . or, if you can’t read the patient’s records correctly, that’s Borkowski, Jacob Andrew.)  They would only let one of us go back to be with him in recovery. When I asked if it was OK for his dad to come back, too, they said, “No, he can only have one visitor at a time.”  I laughed and said, “Oh, this is way past visiting!”  So, we traded off until Jacob was assigned a room on a post op floor, and we went with him to help him settle in.  We left the hospital 22 hours after we had arrived the morning before!  I do not recommend it to anyone, but I’m so grateful we stayed with him every minute of the day or he may still be awaiting surgery!

There are many stories and they would fill a book.  But, the surgery was successful (we learned the next day when the trauma team showed up to check on Jacob) and he is slowly recovering now.  It may take US even longer to recover!

Thanks for all your concern and prayers.