To those that did not know, Jeffrey had decompressive surgery of his thoracic spine at T11 T12 this morning and got to ICU at about 100pm. Surgery went fine as the spine surgeon was able to remove all the epidural mass that was compressing the cord. His electrical potentials were weak going into surgery and no change during surgery which is good Paradoxically he had his best day of PT having walked more and navigating stairs on Friday. The new thoracic MRI Friday looked worse so it was decided to go ahead with the decompression alone since "the paraplegia grim reaper" was standing at his bedside. Frank Pedlow (good guy) a former fellow of Boden and Heller did the surgery. My job besides worrying like hell was to drive the specimens to the Dana Farber Institute where some immunologically compromised mice will be implanted with pieces of the tumor through an open incision by Ewa, a nice polish researcher today. It will take months to grow the tumors and keep transferring to more and more mice. Then they will be treated with different drugs to see which ones kill the tumor. I pray that Jeffrey has the time to see this part to fruition.
PS he is resting comfortably in the ICU on propofol (the Michael Jackson drug) except Jeff is still intubated. I had to call Monty to verify that this is proper ICU treatment before making an A hole out of myself to the iCU nurse. He will be extubated over the next few hours.
PPS It took so long to write this with all the interruptions that Jeffrey woke up is moving his feet and will be extubated in a little bit. Hooray!
Richard D Guyer, MD
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