Not for the squeamish....

What can I say? The surgery was horrible. She went in on Wednesday morning for the "simple" revision. Before she even came out of the OR she started vomiting. They began saying it was due to the anesthesia, but it was apparent quickly that something else was wrong. She was in a lot of pain and couldn't stop heaving her poor little guts out. They did a CT scan and found a lot of blood in the brain around the shunt. They tried to "tap" the shunt - ok, let me go on my first rant here. The word Tap makes me think of Shirley Temple dancing happily in her movies (yes, my age is showing). When they say "tap", they mean stick a needle in the freshly placed shunt & draw out fluid. KT was already sick & feeling like she was going to die, and they started pushing on the surgery site and trying to find the right place to "tap". KT was screaming by the time they found the right place to put the needle. Anyway, they couldn't get any fluid out so they rushed her back to surgery to start all over again. They flushed her out and put in a new one.

Poor kid. She came out of the second surgery a lot quieter than the first, thank goodness. Unfortuately when she woke up she not only had incisional pain, but a headache also. Now, you would think that since they had to operate twice she should have a headache, but the docs were very concerned. "She should not have any headache at all. She should be ready to do cartwheels". Uh, yeah. They did another CT scan and it showed lots of blood still there. Bad news. Apparently blood doesn't flow too well thru shunts. It's a lot thicker than the cerebral spinal fluid the ventricles of the brain makes. They keep her another day to "observe".

On Friday the doc comes in and says they can keep her or send her home, since the treatments will be same. Rest and pain killers. "It's 50/50 at this point. Either the blood will resolve on it's own or we'll have to go back in". And they couldn't give us a time frame for the blood to resolve because "it's not normal for this to happen". Uh, yeah. So we came home with her oxycodone & Nightmare before Christmas pillow Friday night.

Saturday she had a low grade headache all day, but it got worse that night so she took an oxy. Sunday was a nightmare. She crawled out of bed crying about the pain in her head. The inicision didn't even really hurt - she just had yet another killer headache. She took another pain pill - here I go again. I don't know how people can become addited to those things. They do absolutely nothing for her pain. She kept forgetting things for about an hour after she took them, but they don't touch the pain. I guess they're only good if you're not having pain?

Anyway, we went back to Hopkins yesterday. They did another CT & "tapped" the shunt again. Good news/bad news: The CT showed there wasn't any blood in the brain; the bad news is when they tapped the shunt instead of the fluid running clear it was red from blood. Now, I'm no doctor but it seems that if the shunt is sucking blood then there must be bleeding somewhere. They told us the shunt was working fine, and since she's stable they don't want to do any more surgery at the moment and risk irritating the area further. That makes sense. So now it's the waiting game. We have to wait and see what happens. I've got my bags packed just in case we have to sprint the 100 miles to the hospital at any moment. Ugh.