Revelstoke councillor Steve Bender is getting better and could be home by this week, says his wife Adelheid.
“He can get up and go for short walks,” she told the Times Review on the phone from Vancouver on Sunday evening. “He’s still on oxygen and he’s on blood thinners for his heart. He’s really tired and he’s still very sore in his abdomen because he still has lots of fluid in there. That’s what they’re trying to get rid of.”
Bender is in acute care at Vancouver General Hospital after undergoing surgery to stop internal bleeding from his kidneys.
“He’s getting better slowly,” Adelheid said on Thursday.
He is on oxygen but he has been up and walking and is lucid and talking, she added.
Steve Bender’s ordeal began on Jan. 7 when he underwent a biopsy on his kidneys at Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops.
He was sent home but a week later he started experiencing extreme pain. He went to Queen Victoria Hospital and was then rushed to Kamloops for a CT Scan.
“They found he was bleeding internally from where the biopsy had been taken,” Adelheid said.
On Sunday, Jan. 15, he was transported to Vancouver where he underwent surgery to stop the bleeding. He remained in intensive care until Wednesday, when he was transferred to the acute care ward.
Steve Bender is on Warferin, a blood thinner, and has a mechanical heart valve. The biopsy was conducted because his kidneys were only functioning at 20 per cent of capacity, Adelheid said. They won’t function any better than that in the future, she added.
“We got the results today and it is not cancer, thank God,” she said on Thursday.