Sunday, February 5, 2012

Super Shunt Sunday

It is pretty clear that having a second child takes more time from your day, and it hasn't helped me in keeping up with Carly's blog posts. I am hoping to do better though. 

Carly was doing pretty well and pumping the shunt reservoir seemed to be helping. Her days were mixed at times, with periods full of smiles and other times when you could tell something was off. These off periods could be from pumping too much, or not enough, so there has been a lot of trial and error. Three weeks passed for shunt 27, and it was still going strong. Early Saturday morning I went to pump the shunt and the reservoir didn't refill after the first pump. Not refilling means that something is blocking the flow, and we knew then that surgery wasn't far away.

By this morning Carly was not feeling well, and we came up to the ER. After a seven hour wait, the OR was finally free and Carly headed in for shunt #28. Both Dr. Gupta and Dr. Auguste were off for the weekend, so Dr. Sun from Oakland Children's handled the procedure. He found an obvious clog in the ventricular catheter, which he replaced. Carly is resting now in her room on the sixth floor and we expect she will be heading home tomorrow. It wasn't the Super Bowl party we had been planning for, but hopefully Carly's new hardware can last as long as the grin on Eli Manning's face. 

Love, Brad