On Tuesday I had taken Savannah to the doctor because she was vomiting and really irritable which is a sign that her shunt isn't working. Well her regular pediatrician wasn't there that day so we saw another lady. She looked at her ears and said that her right ear was really infected and sent us home with an antibiotic. She said not to worry about her shunt. I still felt like it was her shunt because Savannah can have a severe double ear infection and not even cry because her pain tolerance is so high. Later that night she seemed to be getting worse. She could not keep anything down including her medicine and she was screaming non stop. So I called the on call doc and it happened to be the lady she had saw that day. She said just to bring her in the next morning and they would give her an antibiotic shot. Well morning came and I was getting extremely concerned so I made an appt. with her regular doc. She took some blood and said everything looked great but that she was going to call neurosurgery and see if they wanted to check her out. Well they of course wanted to see her. We went straight to the ER at childrens. Once there they took us right back and cathed her to check her urine, put an IV in (which took 4 tries bc she was so dehydrated) and started her on fluids. She had a CT scan and xrays to check her shunt. They both looked great so they told us it was not her shunt. They admitted her so that she could continue getting fluids and monitoring. They kept her there until Friday morning and sent us home since she was drinking just enough to have wet diapers and not vomiting anymore. (of course she had not eaten in 4 days.) I still felt really uneasy and just could not understand how she could be this sick from a virus. She was also sleeping 23 hours a day. But I trusted the docs and tried to put my gut feeling to the side. Well Saturday morning I had to call back to children's because she was getting really lethargic and both of her eyes were starting to turn inward. By the time we got her back to the ER at childrens her right eye was turned so far in you could barely see her pupil. It was really scary. Well then her heart rate started dropping and they told us to be prepared that she could crash at any minute. I was a complete panicking basket case at this point. Well they did another CT scan and this time it showed enlarged ventricals which meant that the shunt was malfunctioning. They decided to do emergency shunt surgery and had her in surgery within an hour and a half. Since it was the weekend her regular doc didnt do it, the on call doc did. They told us there were more risks with this surgery than last time because the catheter had been in there for a year and had probably become attached to her in places. They said when pulling it out it could cause another brain bleed and if it was too much they would have to put a drain in her head to the outside for a couple days and then go back in to put the shunt back. Thankfully this did not happen. She will be at risk for a brain infection for 6 months so we have to keep a close eye on her. But they inject the shunt with antibiotics before putting it in to help this. Immediately after surgery you could see a difference in her. The nurse carried her out and she was wide awake and smiling. I just felt so so bad that I had not went with my motherly instints and pushed for them to do more tests earlier. They said probably what was happening was that in the beginning it was sputtering but not completely clogged and that is why the CT scan didn't change but once it was completely blocked it started to change and she became critical. I feel so bad because I had started to back down on the whole germ thing and then this happened. There is no way of knowing if that is what caused it, its likely that it wasn't, but had I been on my game I would have known to insist it wasn't a virus. But since I had let people hold her and not wipe things down as much I had in my mind that there was a chance that it was a virus. So pretty much everytime she gets a stomach virus she will have to go to childrens and get her shunt checked because their symptoms are so similar. I know I won't always be able to prevent germs but I am going back to my OCD ways until she is 3. That is the magic number for immune system anyway and at least by then she will be able to vocalize that her head hurts. That way we will be more aware. I just don't want to go through this everytime she is sick. It was a horrible nightmare. They also had to shave alot of her pretty hair. And her incision is quite a bit larger this time. The last three surgeries she had they put dissolvable stitches in but this time the incision was too big so he used the kind that has to be taken out. She goes this coming Monday to get them out. That should be fun.
