Hello everyone in the world,

This is Dougal's First lady reporting back to you because
I am sure you are all waiting with baited breath to hear about the infamous Dougal,the iron man who has survived the miraculous accident he had on the beach last year.Well .......here goes:

He had to have surgery last week to remove the hardware out of his head because his body was rejecting it.I arrived at the hospital after lunch on Wednesday to find him sleeping like a baby in his ward. I was told by the nursing staff that the op was a success,no complications and they managed to remove everything. In fact when they opened him up most of the hardware was floating around in his head,so it was not doing much good anyway!

I left him to sleep and therefore did not plan to go back to the hospital that eve,thinking he would be very drowsy. Well how wrong was I,he woke up,had some dinner and chatted to me on the phone as if he was at home after work. His pain was under control because of the wonderful morphine and he felt fantastic.He went through the pre- op process with me and he had a good feeling about what was going to happen to him which accounts for why he felt so good afterwards.

Its been 5 days since the surgery and because the infection was so bad,he is still in hospital and will be for at least this week. He has a pipe into his back dripping anti biotic onto his spine and only once his blood has tested negative for infection on 3 accounts,will he then be able to come home.

The surgeons have had lengthy discussions with us explaining that he has no support on his neck any longer and he has to be really carefully what exercises he can do,which at this point is just swimming.The cut on the back of his head should be used in a movie set,it is severely gruesome...wow,Vitamin E will come into play pretty soon.

He is recovering well and very bored,which is a good sign,so lets pray he comes home soon.Keep up your prayers and thoughts and I shall keep you posted if there are any changes.

Cheers
KAREN