Things are going much better today. The surgeon saw him again this morning and explained things much better. Basically he was never ready to go home in the first place, which most of us were skeptical about. They had told him 5-7 days in the hospital after surgery, and then they sent him home after 3 and 1/2 days. He had been on some pretty serious pain medication (dilauded, which is 5x stronger than morphine) the entire time he was there. They had him skip on dose on Sat morning and he did okay so they sent him home on vicodin. The surgeon explained today that the dilauded can stay in your system for up to 24 hours, so as that was working its way out of his system, the pain started to come back and vicodin was nowhere near strong enough to keep it under control. They are trying some different things now - a patch and a different pill that he can go home with, and he is back on the dilauded until things are under control again. He is trying to wean himself off of it, and once he can go 24 hours without it he can go home. He was able to skip a dose this afternoon, but then needed it tonight. He is going to try going the day tomorrow without it and see how things go.
Other than that, they say everything looks like it is healing correctly and he is doing good.