September 13th: Another Setback

We awoke this morning planning to take Annie home at some point today. However, her morning lab work is very concerning. Annie's hematocrit and hemoglobin have taken a nosedive in the last 24 hours. This is particularly concerning because she is on a blood thinner to treat her blood clot. So this lab work indicates that she is bleeding internally somewhere. On a better note, her white blood count came back down to 17.3k which is good, although still elevated.

Annie's blood pressure is continuing to trend downwards as well, and she is still having pretty low body temperatures at night. So Annie is not going home today. We'll need to find the source of bleeding and make sure her hemoglobin and hematocrit are stable first.

I drew out stomach contents from Annie's g-button to see if she has bleeding in her stomach and she did have some dark red blood, confirmed by the lab. They suspect that the J-tube coiled up in her stomach the past few days most likely caused irritation to her stomach and has caused some bleeding there, exacerbated by the blood thinner. The blood was dark red and looked like older clotted blood, so they suspect that that bleeding is possibly resolving on its own.

They will check Annie's hematocrit and hemoglobin again this afternoon to see if they are stabilizing or continuing to drop. Her lab work shows that she is working hard to produce more blood, but her body just can't seem to keep up. If she drops to about 7.6 or lower (she's at 8.1 this morning) then they will give her a blood transfusion and be more aggressive in finding the source of bleeding. They may repeat the upper endoscopy to look at her stomach, or do more imaging to find the source. They would also have to stop the blood thinner until the bleeding is controlled.

Fortunately, Molly made it to Minnesota for her band trip early this morning. But my mom is also leaving to go home today too. We're still praying that Annie will be discharged sometime this weekend or early next week.