Another hiccup

When Maggie came back from surgery last night at 6:30 we noticed that her dressing was wet around the central IV. They paged IV therapy to change the dressing. IV therapy came between 9-10 pm and saw that the dressing was saturated with her nutrients that she has been receiving through IV. When flushing the one lumin (she has a double lumin or 2 tubes coming out of the site) with saline, we saw that the saline was dropping down Maggie's chest. This means that either the tubing didn't go far enough into Maggie's vein and it was leaking some out or there is something wrong with the tubing. This made us both sick knowing that there might be a possibility that Maggie will have to go back to surgery again to get it replaced. The other lumin worked fine and it is currently giving Maggie all of her antibiotics and nutrients she needs.

We took Maggie this afternoon to have dye put into her lumen to determine the problem. They found that she has a slit in her lumen. This most likely occurred during surgery. The doctor has said that he would like to wait until Monday to decide what to do. During this time several things need to happen. 1) Maggie is slowly being weaned off of the morphine. They want to see whether she can manage the pain on her own (though the anestheologist said he didn't see any mouth sores in her esophagus during her surgery). 2) They want to see if Maggie will pick up eating on her own, both solids and breastmilk. If so, they will look at stopping her nutrients through the IV. If these two things happen, the doctor might try to hold off on replacing the central IV and only use the single lumen. Chemotherapy would then be given through the single lumen and perhaps begin on Monday. If these two things do not occur, they will look into replacing her temporary central IV.

Andy and I are pretty frustrated with the situation. We are tired of continually getting bombarded with these hits and would like to receive good news again. Tomorrow we will have been in the hospital for a week. We are tired and would like to go home again. We have spent 6 days at home in the month of July.

Please pray that Maggie will not have to go through surgery to replace the temporary IV, that they might be able to begin chemotherapy, she will respond well, and we will be able to go home soon.