Well, it's happened again...

...you've wasted another hour listening to Car Talk. Oh wait, no, sorry, wrong channel. What's happened again, in our household, is shunt failure. On Tuesday, I noticed that the left side of Erica's face seemed a bit droopy. I had her squeeze my hands and move her eyes around and other such tests, and both sides seemed to be functioning close to equal. In fact, her left hand even seemed to be stronger. So I figured it was just leftover from the previous shunt failure and I had just gotten used to it and was re-noticing it. So that evening I mentioned it to James, and he said he'd look at it in the morning. So Wednesday morning, he said, "Yep, the right side of her face looks like it's going to fall off." Wait, the right side? I thought for a second and realized he was right. I'd gotten my sides mixed up looking at her. Her right side shouldn't be drooping at all! Shoot.

So, off to the doctor we go. Actually, James took her because Eldon was throwing up and I was in the middle of making a cake. Because life's fun that way. Sure enough, CT scan shows a fluid build up in the left side of her brain (yes, you read that correctly, the left side, because the left side of your brain controls the right side of your body. Although the CT scan displays it on the right side of the monitor, just to make it more confusing.) Erica had surgery Wednesday evening, and is doing great. She should be coming home this afternoon - Thursday. That's shunt surgery the way it should be -- 24 hours. The left shunt was clogged with "schmuck". So it was replaced, and hopefully all is well. My poor little girl.



I keep wanting to post this, but haven't, so I'll post it now. These are the posters Eldon and Jessica made for Erica when she came home from the hospital last time. If you look closely , yes, closely at it, you can see that all the letters are actually pictures of something. Very creative, I thought.