Always Trust Your Gut Feeling

First of all, I just have to say that Emily is doing WONDERFUL!!!!!!! She hasn't slowed down one time since we came home from the hospital. This is so much different from last Monday and it is the way it should have been all along. Ethan and Emily's cousins are in town from Colorado and they are having the time of their lives. We let the boys (this also includes their cousin Chase) have a sleepover over at Nana and Papa's house, and the girls had a sleepover at our house. I have to say that we definitely got the better end of the deal on this one! Ha-ha! Emily and Ashley are like the best of friends and they played in the playhouse, played outside, stayed up playing a Hannah Montana CD board game for a while last night, and then slept in sleeping bags on the floor while watching tv. It was everything a sleepover should have been. I'm sure the boys pretty much just played video games all evening last night. :)

Now I have to talk a little bit about our week and about our feelings on what happened this week. I know that I blogged about how I talked to our pediatrician earlier in the week when I had concerns about Emily, but I didn't go into details about all of the conversation. You see, from the moment Emily came home last Monday, there was a gut feeling that something wasn't quite right. Things were just different. I was trying not to be too neurotic, and I was sometimes making excuses for things, but I just knew. I couldn't compare this surgery to last year's surgery because she didn't have just a shunt revision last year. She had a brain decompression and her recovery for that was a harder one anyway. The only thing I could compare it to was her shunt revision when she was 2 1/2 years old. When I compared it to then, there was definitely something that wasn't right. So, when I spoke with the pediatrician, I told him about Emily's symptoms and about her not eating and drinking. And the biggest thing I talked to him about was that I was worried that she was having some kind of pressure building up on her brain and I asked him if it was possible if she could have a small amount of hemorrhaging going on. I didn't think at all that the shunt would be clogged again, and I was thinking that maybe she was hemorrhaging or something. He reassured me that if she was having a brain bleed, we would know it! And like I said, I just didn't think the new catheter would be clogged again so soon so I didn't really think specifically about that. Then I started asking about infection then because she kept complaining about her head hurting, but Emily was thinking it was because of the incision site itself. The incision didn't look infected and she wasn't running a fever, though. The pediatrician and I spoke for a very long time about all of this and the one thing he asked me was if she was getting up to play. I said she was. And heck, we all saw her at VBS. She did play. But then again, after short little bouts of playing, she also had to lay down to rest, too. Again with the excuses. She just had brain surgery. Wouldn't we all want to rest after surgery? The not eating and drinking issue was really one of our biggest concerns (and a big red flag). And as I said in my earlier post, regarding the eating and drinking, the doctor told me to force the liquids so she didn't get dehydrated and to not worry about the food. If didn't improve by Friday, I should take her in to the ER or neurosurgeon and get things checked out. Well, on Thursday, she suddenly started eating and drinking and we were very relieved. We thought she was finally doing okay. And you can imagine our surprise on Friday morning when she woke up so very sick.

The moral of this story is that I should have trusted my gut feeling all along. I knew that she wasn't right from the beginning. This time is so different and it is how she is supposed to act. Yesterday morning before I left to head to the ER, I called the pediatrician's office to let them know what was going on. I spoke to the nurse and told her that we thought Emily's shunt was failing and we were rushing her to the ER in Pensacola and that the neurosurgeon was going to meet us there. There was silence on the phone for a second and then the nurse quietly said to me, "You had a feeling that there was something wrong all along, didn't you?" I replied to her that I did. While we were in the ER, our pediatrician called me on my cell phone to check on Emily, but we still hadn't seen the neurosurgeon. He was very concerned about her and said that it did sound like shunt failure. He wished us well and said that he would be checking in with us again.

What a week this has been. I can't believe that it has ONLY been one week. This one week has taken about ten years off of my life! :)