Day 749 - Jun 17, 2010

We had a really good day today. We had to go to the hospital for a video conference with our plastic surgeon (he is actually from Maryland and comes one week a month to work on the burn patients) and then Kevin had his stitches removed. He did really well with that and then Kev wanted to go visit everyone on the burn ward. We did visit for a while and then we headed toward home.

I did learn some things today. First, Kevin will begin to have between 30 and 40 CCs of saline solution put into his expander starting next week. We will continue to do this until roughly the last week of August when we will have the plate put back in (once again - barring any infections). Kevin needs to have a CT scan done of his head pretty soon so that the plate can be ordered too. It takes about 4 weeks to have one made.

I have also decided to detox Kevin beginning Jul 7 - a day after his birthday. I am already starting the process, but Kevin will be admitted to the hospital on that day for roughly 10 days as we pull him off of the methadone. At this point, we are adding methadone, hoping to eliminate the oxycontin. Apparently there aren't as many side effects from decreasing the meth as there are from oxy. I am scared to death to do this, but I am trusting the docs on this one.

We also have a dentist appt on the 29th of this month and our team at BAMC wants Kevin to have ALL of his dental work done before this plate is put in. This will be interesting as we are having the work done at a VA clinic and we all know how slow they are. Personally, I can't see it happening and I only hope that I am proven wrong.

The thought process on this is dental work also runs the risk of infection and we want all possible infections treated before the plate is reinserted. If Kevin's new plate were to get infected, I believe he would have to wait a full year to have a third put in. That would be horrible!

And this pretty much wraps up our day. Here's hoping tomorrow is another good one!