September 12th: Getting Closer!

Although Annie's CT scan last night failed to get information about the vessels in her chest, we did learn today that the CT scan showed that her J-tube has become dislodged and is all twisted up in her stomach instead of running down into her small intestines. No wonder it's not flushing well! It's all kinked up in her tummy!

They were able to get a new IV started again this morning so we repeated the CT scan with the contrast actually going where it was supposed to go. Thankfully, there are no other clots or embolisms, other than the one in her upper arm.

We were trained on how to give her blood thinner shots, and tomorrow they will check her drug level to see if her dose needs to be adjusted. We'll also have a consultation with Hematology to find out exactly how long she'll need to receive these twice-daily shots, potentially 6 months or more.

They wanted us to resume Annie's regular ulcerative colitis medication that can easily clog her tube, so we went ahead and gave it to her through the G-port of the GJ tube. Just as we expected, it clogged. So this afternoon, we removed the GJ tube, since the J-tube portion was all twisted up in her stomach anyway, and replaced it with her regular G-button. Thank goodness!

So at this point, there is nothing they are doing at the hospital that we can't do at home for Annie. So we suspect that she might be going home tomorrow! She'll still need a lot of monitoring--her white blood count went up today, so we'll have to watch that as well as some other labs that aren't normal yet. Her temperatures are still dropping slightly at night and she's still having higher heart rates. We hope that those are just side effects from the blood clot, and as that resolves over time, everything else will too. Annie will have several appointments in the upcoming weeks as she continues to be monitored, but it will be much easier to do clinic visits than stay in the hospital! She's not out of the woods yet, but it will be such a blessing to have her home with us again! Thank you so much for all your prayers for her!