September 10th: Bouncing Back!

After such a horrible scare last night, Annie has seemed to bounce back today just fine. She spent the entire afternoon up in her wheelchair watching a movie and playing with her beads on her tray. Her temperature seems to have stabilized and she was able to come out from under the heating blankets and heat lamp around noon today.

Annie's heart rate is still elevated, which it has been for about a week or more. Her hemoglobin is down to 9.7 but they believe it's because she hasn't been getting her normal diet for a while and because they've been drawing so much blood every day for two weeks now.

Between the high heart rate, elevated CRP, and hypothermic episode last night, they suspect she still has an infection somewhere, but no one really knows. We are encouraged that her white blood count came down so much today, but it is still pretty high. They drew blood from two different locations on her today to culture. So we'll have to wait a couple days to get the results from those. If things make a turn for the worse, they will consider imaging her spine to look for infection.

Annie is now on feeds that are equivalent to her diet and fluid intake at home! They are going through her G-tube and she is doing great! The nurse partially clogged her J-tube this morning with meds, so we're going to start giving all meds through the G-tube now. I think Annie can tolerate that now anyway. Hopefully we'll be able to transition from the GJ tube back to the regular G-tube soon and then we won't have to worry about all these clogging issues!

So they are just watching Annie and waiting for blood culture results. If they are negative after just 24 hours, they will consider pulling out her PICC line, which could be a possible source of infection. Annie hasn't been using her PICC line for anything for a day or so, but they want to keep it in a while longer in case blood cultures show that she needs more IV antibiotics. Final culture results won't be in until Friday. We're praying for a calm and uneventful night tonight!