Not the Week We Expected!

So here it is the night before Annie's second surgery for her salivary gland ablation and I'm just barely updating our blog!  This week has definitely NOT turned out to be how we expected!  Annie was finally discharged from the hospital last Thursday evening, much later than we had expected, because she spiked high fevers of 103.8.  It took them most of the day to figure out the source of the fever, and we were relieved to find out it was just a UTI.  Not something we wanted to deal with right now, but easy to treat.

We've been glad we thought to bring Annie's suction machine with us because we used it several times an hour around the clock for the first several days of recovery and even today are still using it rather regularly still.  But generally, Annie has done very well recovering from part one of her salivary gland ablation.  I actually caught this little smile last Thursday after we got her settled for the night at the Ronald McDonald house.

We're noticing just a small amount of paralysis on the right side of her face, but that's often expected and almost always temporary, lasting anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months. 

This picture below was taken just tonight.  She still has a small amount of swelling under her cheek and chin on her right side, but the swelling under her tongue has gone down even more.  I was expecting the swelling to be nearly gone by the time they do the left side, but I guess this is good enough!

The big thing that threw us off this week was the flu that hit me Friday morning.  I think all my stress and lack of sleep lately have finally caught up with me, although Justin believes I caught a bug at the hospital last week.  The floors are on lock-down due to all the cases of flu, especially on the pulmonology floor Annie has to be on, so the visitor policy is restricted, and patients are not allowed out of their rooms for any reason.  I thought I was being careful, but not enough, I guess.  I've literally been in bed about 95% of the time since Friday.  Justin has been wonderful in taking care of Annie as well as me, all while trying to work away from his office.  This was definitely not the leisurely vacation we had expected!  But today has been looking up and I think I'm finally starting to improve--just in time to go back to the germ-laden hospital!

We're disappointed that we had to cancel some fun plans while we're here.  We had planned to attend church nearby on Sunday and visit with a friend from Austin, Texas while she was also here on vacation, but we clearly didn't make it to church!  I was especially saddened to have to cancel plans with a friend here who also has a daughter with Aicardi Syndrome.  Chances to visit with Aicardi friends are so rare, I was really looking forward to seeing Ronda and Marissa, but of course couldn't take the chance of spreading anything to her sweet daughter.

On Sunday Justin helped me muster enough strength to drive to the Columbus temple.  We knew it was in the parking lot of the stake center, but we didn't realize quite how small it would be.  It is by far the smallest temple I've ever seen.  We thought about how wonderful it would be to have our temple right there so close to our chapel--no excuses for not regularly attending the temple! 

Tomorrow hopefully I'll feel better enough to actually take some pictures of the Ronald McDonald house since it's the 2nd largest in the world and has been such a wonderful place to stay.  I'll definitely post some updates on Annie as well.  She's been rather congested and phlegmy today and has been throwing up some bile, but we're hoping that's just still from the UTI or just trying to deal with her congestion.  It would be nice, ideally, to get her a little less junky before surgery, but hopefully after tomorrow she'll have much fewer secretions leading to all this congestion. 

On a side note, we found out after her last procedure that her sublingual  glands were rather large for her age.  The sublinguals are the glands that produce mucous, so hopefully once she gets both sublinguals treated we can say goodbye to all this phlegm and congestion.  We appreciate everyone's prayers for Annie and also for me!  Please continue to keep her in your prayers as she undergoes her second surgery tomorrow!