A Rough Day, But a Happy Ending

The infectious diseases team met with us this morning.  It is all agreed that Annie needs another dose of gamma globulin today.  I'm not sure how many more additional doses they will consider giving her, but the ID doctor did mention that if the diarrhea still isn't improving soon, they would be considering a fecal transplant for next week.  I'm sure that sounds gross to everyone, but just FYI, the fecal matter from the household member is heavily filtered and mixed with other substances before they put it in Annie's tummy through her g-tube.  The success rate of fecal transplant in treating c-diff is supposedly pretty high (85%), so if the gamma globulin treatments don't work (we still have high hopes for it to work), then at least we are encouraged that fecal transplant might work.

So just as the nurse was bringing in the gamma globulin and setting up the feeding bag, Annie started screaming in pain.  Since I wanted to make sure that Annie wouldn't vomit up the gamma globulin, it was agreed that we should wait to give it to her until she calmed down.  She had a fit of pain like this last night and only calmed down once she received motrin, so I immediately asked for motrin, and held Annie on my lap to rock her.  It took the motrin a full hour to start to work--the longest hour of the entire hospital stay so far.   It just broke my heart to sit and hold her screaming in pain and not be able to do anything at all to help her. 

I held her for another hour after the motrin started to work and she took two short naps on my lap.  I love the peaceful spirit that I always feel when I'm able to quietly hold Annie.  I truly know that she is a celestial spirit--an angel here on earth.  I feel incredibly humbled and blessed to be her mother.  She is such an incredible example of patience and long-suffering and finding joy and happiness even in the middle of all her struggles and pain.  She is my hero and I love her so much!

So after rocking Annie for 2 hours, I called the nurse in to start her gamma globulin but the nurses said they had orders to hold the gamma globulin because there was a possibility that Annie could actually get her PICC line later in the afternoon! (She can't have anything in her tummy for several hours before the procedure.)  So we were really excited that they were even considering doing it today.  So we waited around for several hours until we were finally told that they couldn't do it that afternoon, but got her scheduled for Saturday morning!  So we got the green light to finally give her the gamma globulin and she kept all of it down, so hooray! So hopefully we'll start to see an improvement soon and she'll be much more comfortable once she gets the PICC line in and doesn't have to get a new IV every day and keep getting poked for daily blood work! Annie continued fussing off and on the rest of the evening--it was a rough day for her with a lot of pain, but at least it ended with the good news about the PICC line scheduled in the morning.