One Year Ago Today: 01/20/2013 - Urgent Late Night Dialysis Session

(01/20/2013, Sunday) [Today's update was originally multiple emails, thus the timestamps.]

09:32PM Evie's ability to oxygenate her blood deteriorated steadily throughout the day -- if she gets much worse, she will be moved back to Pediatric ICU. She had an echocardiogram and an x-ray. Both indicate that she has fluid in her lungs again.

They have called dialysis nurses back to the hospital to facilitate Evie having dialysis tonight, starting at about 2300 or so -- she'll simultaneously get a blood transfusion in attempt to get more hemoglobin into her (the transportation mechanism for oxygen in the bloodstream.)           

09:45PM Evie's doctor just arrived: They will not be truly dialyzing her tonight, but rather it will strictly be a fluid pull.   Evie will have dialysis as scheduled tomorrow morning at 0900ish. The transfusion will occur in tandem with tomorrow morning's dialysis.

11:00PM Evie's hooked up.   She'll be here for 1.5 hours, the target removal is around 500-1000 ml's.   The bumpy bed ride down to the dialysis center stressed her out, and her oxygen went further down... Evie ended up in a coughing fit and lost her dinner. :-(

12:43AM We're done, just waiting for transport back to the room... they removed 800 ml's. Evie watched Curious George, and now she has passed out. Waking her up to feed her prior to dialysis in hopes of catching up on what she lost tonight will be difficult, if not entirely fruitless, but I have to try.

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Epilogue: Evie only requires 1 liter of oxygen, as opposed to 3 when she started. We'll see what tomorrow brings. In other news, Larry (Evie's equivalent to Christopher Robin's Pooh Bear) took the brunt of the blast when Evie lost her dinner, so once Evie was stabilized and connected for the fluid pull from the dialysis machine, I went about damage control.

Unfortunately for Larry (and me since I have laundry I need to do here) this is what I found in the only patient/family laundry area I know of in this complex:

So I went about washing Larry in the sink by hand.

Gratefully Larry seems to have made a full recovery.

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.