June 4, 2009

As you can imagine, the past few days have been a bit of a blur. It seems like so much has happened in the past few days! I will start with the surgery news, sorry if I am repeating myself. When Dr. Pearson came out after the surgery he told us that the tumor had infiltrated more of her muscle and more of her skull than they had anticipated. He said it was just a bunch of goo and that he had to scrape quite a bit out of her muscle and that they removed a good amount of her skull that had been "infected". Most of the skull will grow back on its own. He also said that after the pathology comes back (7-10 days) that he will decide the next step. If it is LCH they may send us to an oncologist to do a full body bone scan. If they find anymore masses she may have to have treatment that is similar to cancer treatment, but in very small doses. If it isn't LCH, well...I don't know.

We were in recovery all day. From about 10:45-7:30. CJ just could not get past the upset stomach. The first few hours they were concerned about her vomiting and the pressure that it would put on her incision. So they gave her a few different types of meds, trying to keep her from throwing up. It was successful, for a while. She ended up throwing up, but it was pretty late in the day and it had been long enough that they weren't too worried about her incision anymore. CJ wasn't complaining of any pain. She wasn't crying. She wasn't whining or fussing. She was just lying there, sometimes sleeping, sometimes not. That girl barely let out a whimper all day.

After we finally got a room the nurse upstairs washed her incision and while she was doing that, Clara Jean cried. (And so did I.) It was almost 9 o'clock at night, she was exhausted and I think that her pain meds were wearing off a little. But once we got through that, she was fine and ready to sleep. She kept telling Tom that she wasn't tired and that she wanted to watch tv. But the lights had only been out about 2 minutes and she was out. Tom stayed at the hospital and I came home. It was really hard for me to leave. But I knew that I would be better for CJ the next day if I got some sleep. I also wanted to bring Lillie, Emma and Della up to the hospital in the morning, so my being at home made that easier.