One Year Ago Today: 12/27/2012 - "Good" Day, Bad News

(12/27/2012, Thursday)

• Evie only lost about 250 or so ml's of blood today.
   
• She required 5 units of insulin.
   
• She is no longer requiring the BiPAP to breathe and is down to 3 liters of oxygen per hour at 50% via nasal cannula (hooray, we can speak to communicate!) and I'm confident we'll be dialing that further down on Friday.
   
• Today's echocardiogram indicates the effusion (liquid collecting just outside of Evie's heart) has increased again and is now classified as moderate.
   
• She is experiencing chest pain and doesn't often mention it until she's in agony. Luckily morphine is quick.
   
• Still trying to work things out schedule-wise so we can be sure she gets physical therapy in every day -- it got cut short by the echocardiogram today.
   
• The official results of her perfusion test aren't available yet, but the off-the-cuff analysis is that her kidneys are in bad shape, and are not likely to improve much. (Exactly the news we were expecting, but it still isn't fun to hear)--so we'll be putting in an access for peritoneal dialysis sometime--but not until this whole GI bleed thing has been handled.
  
  
   
• Due to continued bleeding, an endoscopy continues to be an unavailable option. We spoke directly to the gastroenterologist at length today, and he seemed as mystified as I am about the cause... he's ordered some tests that we can do--he'd wanted to do an MRI, but that would involve injecting something that would cause Evie further damage because her kidney performance is so poor, so instead she'll be getting a CT scan. I already had qualms about the amounts of radiation my little girl has been subjected to in her short 8 year stint on earth... this hospital stay is not helping.

DISCLAIMER: Posts Labeled "One Year Ago Today" are a record of what transpired when Evie first became ill.  The slightly edited text comes from emails which we sent to family to let them know what was happening, and to keep them updated.  These posts are usually long, but if you want to truly understand what life was like for us, and what led to this point, it makes for great "light" reading.