Two steps forward and one step back

Sunday 5/24:
Erica's doctor noticed on her most recent ct scan that the side of her brain w/o the shunt is now filling rapidly, and that is leading to Erica's new deterioration. She went in for surgery to day to put a new shunt line into the other side of her brain to drain the fluid so she can fill better. The surgery was short and the brain pressures in her head are low again. She's awake, but pretty out of it. Her eyes move around a bit, and she can move her fingers and arm, but she doesn't do it much.

Monday 5/25:
Erica is pretty unresponsive today. She will wake up and respond, but it takes a bit of poking to get her there. Her temp keeps going up and the pressures in her head have gone up twice. She did give the neurosurgeon a high five after he adjusted the pressures in her head.Her pneumonia is about the same. Her blood count is low, so they're going to give her a transfusion since she's anemic. Having been anemic and otherwise healthy myself, I can only imagine how much the anemia is fatiguing her. She was getting quite puffy from all the fluids she was getting, so they gave her some medicine to drain out the fluids, and she looks much better now.

Tuesday 5/26:
Erica was still lethargic this morning. She did respond to the doctor's commands (like a high-five and holding up her arms), but with her eyes shut tight. Her chest xray was tremendously improved, so much so that the doctor had to double check that she was looking at the right patient's xrays. Her transfusion went great last night, bringing her blood count up to normal. The doctor turned off the breathing machine to see what would happen (you should have seen the look of shock on the other doctor's faces when she confessed that), and Erica breathed fine on her own. So they decided to let her breathe on her own for longer to see what would happen. She was fine until she was given morphine for pain, and then her breathing rate slowed enough that they wanted to put her back on. She's still having trouble with pressure spikes in her head and fevers. They also did an EEG. I'm not sure why.
At that time I went to my room to lay down for a bit. I woke up 3 hours later. A bit tired, maybe?
Maybe. In the evening, I had a different little girl. She woke up about 5:00 when the neurosurgeon came to check on her. And not just her open-slit-eyes,-I'm-not-sure-if-she's-really-in-there state of usual awakefulness that she has been doing. Eyes fully open and looking around. Hooray! I read her a story, she told me yes or no which one she wanted, she played thumb wars with me, arm wrestled with me, and laughed at my knock-knock joke (which, incidentally, caused her to choke on the saliva she was pooling in her mouth. Oops...) She then fell back asleep while listening to music. James and the kids came up to see her. After Eldon went in and read to her the cards his class had made, James said she was awake. So he took in Zachary to see her. He quickly came back with a teary Zach and said, "If she wasn't awake before, she sure is now!" Apparently he leaned Zach in for a hug, and he just started screaming. The nurse was laughing about it later. After they left I read her another story and played with her some more. It was hard not to make her laugh because it was so good just to see her laugh (btw, she didn't make any noise laughing, but her chest was laughing, if you know what I mean. If you don't know what I mean, um, sorry.) Then she watched a Pooh Bear movie and fell asleep. Until I turned it off and kissed her goodnight, of course. But I'm so happy with the way the evening ended.

I haven't been able to update the blog because the computers at the hospital wouldn't let me for some reason. But now I have James' laptop, so hopefully I'll be able to update more often. And I'm really craving a root beer, but the vending machine doesn't have any. Silly vending machines.