The Storm Before the Calm

We had quite a flurry of activity this morning, starting at 4:00 am. Abigail has been throwing up and not nursing terribly well lately which is obviously a cause for concern. It was possible that the antibiotics were making her stomach upset but they couldn't take her off antibotics until the "drain" had been removed from her head.

The "drain" is a tube that they put below the skin across her forehead that collects blood and other bodily fluids and carries them down the tube, out of her head behind her ear and into a bulb attached to her nightgown. She's had it in since the surgery but the surgeons decided to pull it out this morning. That process is rather painful, as you can imagine, and she screamed through the entire thing. But it is really, really nice to have that out of her head: we don't have to carry the bulb around when holding or moving her and we don't run the risk of her trying to pull on it (they ended up putting a splint on her arm so that she couldn't grab it).

But that is gone now and so she doesn't need the antibiotics anymore. But after they pulled the drain, they took her down for a CT scan this morning. They were afraid that she was throwing up so much because it was possible that there could be blood clotting on the brain. If that was the case, then there were going to have to be more procedures and operations to fix it. So, of course, we were very worried. But a look at the CT scan didn't show any clotting, for which we are really relieved.

So all of the above happened in a few short hours, then Abigail was able to sleep. The report late morning today was that she was feeling much better, looked much better, her swelling went down a bit, was smiling and was even able to see very slightly out of one eye. She also had her last IV come out so she is down to two lines which are only monitors. Nothing is stuck into her body anymore!

So things are calm at the moment, but one never knows when things will get crazy again. The plastic surgeon even came in this afternoon and told us that we could take her home today if we were comfortable with it!! Wow! However, we aren't comfortable taking her home just yet and the nurse agrees so we are going to wait until some time tomorrow. Hopefully oozing will stop and the swelling will go down at least enough for her to see and then we'll feel better about taking her home.

Tonight I plan on posting some photos of the past few days.