The Road to Recovery Starts Today

What a difference today was from yesterday.

Payton has been sleeping almost constantly.  She's so calm that the nurses almost get worried and come by to check on her.  She's had very little Tylenol (unlike yesterday) and has been sleeping like a baby should.

Today we arrived for cuddles and she essentially slept through all the handling.

We were there for rounds and Payton's doing very well especially in lieu of what her last few days have been.

Her stomach (G-tube) drainage has been very good and in 12 hours was only 7 ml (down from 35ml the previous 12 hrs.  It did go up in the afternoon but because of the fussyness during the wound packing and other stuff (to follow).

Surgery was by and they sort of checked the incision (left the bandages on for the nurse to change) and they have approved increase in feeds.  She's only on an extra 1 ml/hr (for the next 24 hours) but we'll take any progress we can get.

Then the NICU team came by for rounds.  There were no issues and they were glad to hear of increased feeds and the low stomach drainage.

Payton's two IV's continue to hold so her IV feed/meds have been split between the two making a replacement less likely (hopefully they will hold till her PICC is placed).

We were also there for the dressing removal (where they also removed the gauze they stuffed into the wound yesterday).  They cleaned and restuffed gauze into the wound.  The purpose is to keep it open so that it doesn't close shut thereby traping more bacteria and possibly causing another abcess. Its not pretty and it'll leave a good sized scar.

I did take a picture of it but Dwayne and I decided not to share. Its a particularily nasty picture and I only took it for Payton...so she can see (if she chooses) how strong she was and how much she accomplished for when she's older.   We recognized that so many pictures of Payton are not great ones (despite this being her life right now) and we thought that it was time since she's doing so good, to not share something not so nice looking.

I did take another photo (close up) for the doctors/nurses so they have a comparison picture (they were looking but couldn't find the camera to take one while it was exposed).  So tomorrow they'll have today's photo to see if there's any improvement or not.

We still haven't gotten her ECHO results but I'm going to assume its because there was nothing to report.  So for now, we're assuming (and treating her like) Payton no longer has any signs of pulminary hypertension.

As mentioned earlier, her drainage was great for the first 12 hours of the day. During the cleaning of her incision Payton hardly moved...she did squirm a bit but no crying and she was so easy to handle (shows how much that abcess hurt). 

Later before we left we changed her very full diaper (she blew it out with poop) so we're happy to report that her bowels are working well. She had a huge diaper!!

We hope that continues on with the increased feeds and is positive enough to urge the surgeons on to letting her feed more in quickly intervals.  But again, I'll take forward motion, however small, as long as we have the worst behind us.