An Update...

So I've mentioned before that I've been diagnosed with an extremely rare disease called Devic's NMO. Basically it means that the white blood cells in my body get confused and attack my spine and optic nerves. Recently I spent December 16th - 24th in the hospital to get a treatment called Plasmapheresis because my optic nerves were being attacked and causing me to lose my vision. Here's some pictures from the process.

The bag of yellow stuff is the Plasma that was pulled out of my body at each treatment.

Hooked up to the machine for my first Plasmapheresis treatment.

My routine hospital stay turned into something else though... There is a 1% chance that during the installation of a Quintin Cath, which is the 16 gauge tube placed in the jugular vein, that the lung can be nicked. Unfortunately this happened to me and my lung ended up collapsing while I was in the hospital and I had to have emergency bed side surgery to have a chest tube inserted because I was told I would not make it to the OR.

The chest tube in all it's glory.

Due to the fact that I was having my plasma pulled from my body the lung failed to heal on it's own and I had to have plasma added back into me and a blood patch done on my lung. 120cc of blood was taken from my body and dumped into my lung. I then had to roll around and coat my lung in my blood so that it could find the tear and patch it up. This had a 60% chance of working and thank God it did.

My blood being dumped back into my lung for the blood patch.

I was able to leave the hospital on the 24th and spend Christmas with my family. That's a quick update on what's been going on around my place. Of course there still is a huge announcement coming later today so stay tuned for that. It's going to be epic :)