Prayers for Annabel

Yesterday afternoon Annabel started being fussy with her bottle again and was irritable and at bedtime bottle vomitted, but did drink her pediasure afterward. This morning she vomitted again during breakfast so I brought her to the ER, per the plan with neuro. Her CT scan showed a 2-3 x's increase in ventricle size compared to her CT scan in December! Because of this they got her scheduled as an emergent add on to the OR and things moved quickly!

Thankfully her neurosurgeon, Dr. Maher, was in the OR today and did her surgery. She did great during the surgery and is recovering well (although in quite a bit of pain). The surgeons ended up having to replace the entire shunt system, the failure was the part in her belly, which is more rare but can happen. This can be a mechanical failure but could also be that a slow growing bacteria caused the failure, that is why the surgeons decided to replace the entire system. They sent out a spinal fluid culture and we will know in two weeks if it grows, if not everything is good, if so then they will send out another culture (the thought is that by replacing the entire system, if it was there that hopefully it will clear out), if that also grows then they will probably remove the entire shunt system for her body for a week or so, with her hospitalized and being pumped with antibiotics. Please pray this is not the case! She is on vancomycin now but the plan is to be sent home tomorrow afternoon provided all goes well. She is now in the 3 month window of higher risk for infection but Dr. Maher said that she was fine previously so hopefully she will be again, please pray that is the case.

We've already had a few visitors - thanks Laura and Justin for coming to see us! We also had our favorite NICU fellow (Dr. Rebecca)stop by and a few members of the UofM football team stopped by and signed hats for the kids and since there were extras they asked if she had any siblings and if Dad would want one so they signed ones for them too, so nice!

Thank you for your continued prayers, it was a scary day but was also a relief because this ongoing problem(which my gut had always felt was the shunt) was finally discovered and we were able to act on it and get Annabel feeling better!