Surgery

Gosh, it has been a while since my last post and I was doing so well. Please forgive me. We have been on an emotional roller coaster the past week. Let me bring you up to speed.

Friday Dec 21:  day of surgery. We are aupposed to be at hospital for 0500. We wake Shayleigh up at 0415 and the first thing she says is "mommy can we play now?"  We travel to hospital where she preceds to keep us entertained and talks the whole way there. We get all the paperwork and head to day surgery. Nicks cousin, who is an NICU NP at the hospital stays with us. Shayleigh wants in the window so they start talking about the sun coming out. Shayleigh's greatest concern before surgery "the sun is coming out."  We head down to preop. The nurse is fabulous and she and Shayleigh bond. She shows Shayleigh how to maky a water gun out of a syringe. She also takes her to see the sun coming out. They attempt twice for an IV and eventually decide to get it while she is under anethesia. We convince her to give us kisses bye. She is so excited to ride the stretcher on her new friends lap. Thats about 0745. They finally call to tell us they started surgery around 10:40. We get hourly updates. It took about 3 hours just to get to the tumor and then they call and say basically it's more involved than what they thought and the surgeon is having to go in and remove piece by piece and send it down to pathology to make sure she is getting the tumor and not normal brain tissue. Everytime I get an update I have a melt down and around the time I settle down it's time for another update. Around 1600 we get the call that she is closing up, Shayleigh did great and the surgeon will be out soon to talk to us. The surgeon comes out with a smile and blood shot eyes. She says she thinks she got it all, but she isn't sure because she had to go by feel and experience. The tumor wasn't well delineated and wasn't discolored. She said she got in there and had to look at the MRI before surgery to even see where the tumor was suppposed to be since the tissue all looked totally normal. She said she had to go through each piece and remove the areas that felt hard. She has been amazing and brutally honest with us through this whole process. She kept saying it was really hard. She ended saying I hope I wasn't too aggressive, but I hope I was aggressive enough. We were just so happy our baby was out, the surgeon was smiling and seemed optimistic and we were done!! Little did we know what was to come. Shayleigh finally got into a room in PICU about 6 ish that night. She was still intubated and they were hurrying to get her to CT & MRI instead of waiting and calling them out the next day (Saturday) as previously discussed. When it is all said and done she gets back to her room and they let our family come back and see her. The surgeon calls about 10:15 to check on us and asks to talk to me. She tells me she was at home checking CT results and she was pleasantly surprised to find Ct & Mri results posted. She tells me that the CT shows some swelling which is normal and expected. She also tell us that some of the tumor is still there. She says "it is on the right side and I saw it but I didn't feel confident and comfortable removing it so I left it there." She says "I think from the look of the tumor while we were in there that it is benign, but we will wait on the path results. I don't see us needing or having to go back in. I would just like to continue following up with MRIs. I am very pleased. I also don't want to start extubating her at 10 at night. So let's wait until the morning."  I was totally fine with that since I wasn't crazy about extubating that late at night either. So, the first night after surgery was restless for her. They didn't want to keep her too sedated since they were going to be extubating first thing in the am so she would rest for a few hours and then cry. Then we would have to give her something to calm her and help her rest again. This happened all night long. Since she was extubated I had already decided I would stay up and watch her just in case the machine started beeping while the nurse was away. I made it until 0430 then, knowing visiting hours were at 0500 and my family and Nick would be there I shut my eyes for a few minutes. Plus, the nurse was sitting in the window watching. Anyway, paranoid mommy. They extubated her that morning and she did excellent. No problems at all breathing on her own. I will update another blog later and continue to catch ya'll up!! Thanks for the continued prayers! Our family really appreciates them!

Love,
Nikki