Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Surgery off and then on again

Well, today has been crazy so far! This morning Dr. Scarli, one of the resident Neuro Surgeons, called me at 7am to let me know that Dawson had an elevated white blood cell count and that they would not put a shunt in. It looked like his CSF was still infected. They did plan to send him down for his other surgery (2 hernias and a circumcision) and they would put in another EVD to see if the white cells were just clinging to the old one.

15 min later Dr. Scarli called me back to let me know that they had him down in surgery, but they were sending him back. One of his tests came back with low platelet count. They then knew he had another infection and they couldn't risk doing any surgery with him like that. They sent him back up to his room.

Needless to say this was quite discouraging. I am worried about Ryan. He is amazing and wonderful and it has been great for him to spend so much time with Jake. However, he needs to get up to Sun Valley so he can get more of his work done. I know this was stressing him out and it was a cause of a lot of my stress. I was thinking that I would have to go home and leave Dawson here, recruiting family members to spend sometime with Daws. It was tearing me apart. I felt like I was abandoning Dawson. He totally knows when I am there. He loves when I hold him and talk to him. He is so sweet and it is hard to have him just lay there when I can't be there. He does have Physical, Occupational, and Speech Therapy coming in everyday to play with him, help him eat, and stretching him out. That is nice. At least he doesn't spend all day in bed. He is out quite a bit, between them, me and the nurses that can't seem to put him down. (They all like him a little bit :) )

Anyway, just minutes after getting off the phone with Ryan Dr. Walker called. First, he is amazing. We are so blessed to have him. He is a doctor that is lead by the spirit and that is so comforting. Other Neuro Surgeons have told me, when they don't know what else to do, that they want to wait for Dr. Walker to see him, because "he just sees and feels things that we don't". They don't know how to explain it, but we do :)

Dr. Walker, knowing Dawson really well, was disappointed at the news of the surgery being off. He said that he had a feeling that something was up. He went up himself and drew samples of CSF and took them to the lab. He wanted to get the results himself. He told me that he didn't know what the mix up was but the tests that he did all came back normal. He went to the people that told them they weren't and wanted there source. Well, come to find out they were looking at numbers from 2 weeks ago when he was infected. We don't know why they were, but they sure gave us a scare. We thought we were looking at another 2-3 weeks. Now we are back on schedule to go home on Thursday.

When Dr. Walker told me this, he must have thought I was crazy. I burst into tears and thanked him so much. I think most Dr.s would have just taken the info and moved on with their schedule. Thank goodness he didn't! It was such a relief. I don't have to leave Dawson here and Ryan will get back to work!

They will do the surgeries this afternoon. I will let you know how it goes!

Love, Amy

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's so crazy that they were looking at the wrong data... what the heck? I hope everything goes well with his surgeries today!

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