Mighty Little c

Carly continues to make small steps in the right direction each day. We are still in the PICU, a requirement for patients who have an external ventricular drain. Neurosurgery has been weening Carly off this drain over the last several days and it has been clamped since last night. Since the clamping, Carly has been handling her cerebrospinal fluid on her own without the need for a shunt or external drain. She will have a CT scan tomorrow morning and if everything looks good the drain will come out. Carly's shunt will stay in place, though turned off, for several months to see if she can manage without it in the long run.

Carly is still pretty quiet, mostly sleeping and spending a few hours a day awake. She can move both arms and legs and her right eye is starting to open wider, something that it didn't do for the first few days after her surgery. This is all expected for someone who went through what one of the attending doctors called "an extreme surgery." He also said that in his 34 years at UCSF he has never seen such a large tumor in someone so small (and he isn't the first to tell us this.) She really is a little miracle, and she hasn't lost an ounce of the fight that has gotten her this far. The entire medical team is really pleased with her progress and soon we can start focusing on physical therapy, hopefully from the comfort of our home.

Love, Brad