Epidural Problem Discovered!

Annie had a pretty good night last night.  The anesthesiologist came in this morning to remove her epidural.  While doing so, we discovered a large puddle of meds pooled in the tegaderm dressing over the epidural site.  They think that her epidural has been leaking and that's why it wasn't working well yesterday.  However, it seemed to work really well overnight because they suspect that the pocket of fluid back-filled up full enough eventually to cause enough pressure to force the medicine into the epidural space. 

So Annie slept fairly comfortably last night, also receiving valium and lortab through the night as well.  She did have some seizures around 4:00-4:30am during which she bit her lip pretty badly and had a bit of bleeding from that.  We were surprised to see her have seizures since she's on the extra valium.  After her last knee surgery a few years ago, she had hard seizures that caused a tendon graft to pull out and fail, so we're trying really hard this time to keep her legs stabilized and seizures to an absolute minimum to help prevent the sutures in her tendons from pulling out.

This morning they removed her epidural as well as her foley.  They gave her another big bolus through the epidural before removing it, so it will be interesting to see how her pain does over the next hour or two as that wears off.  We're trying to stick to just oral pain meds to hopefully transition to being able to go home, but she might need a couple doses of some IV pain meds as the epidural wears off.  As long as she can get by with just oral pain meds, we should be able to go home later this afternoon.

Annie started getting fed her regular formula through her g-button late last night, starting at a very slow rate on her pump.  She tolerated those feeds well through the night, but vomited once this morning, so we'll have to keep an eye on that, but I think it's very likely we go home sometime this afternoon.

This morning Lexie is happy that she gets to hang out with Annie, and even asked to snuggle up with Annie as much as she could without causing Annie pain.  I love how much she loves her sister! 

Oh, and I was asked what happened to Lexie's forehead... I guess it does look like a scrape, but it's only a tattoo that she got at the hospital party last night.  I'm not sure why she chose to put it on her head, but it sounds like we're going to have to bribe her to get it off eventually!