Sorry for the delay in posting! I have been keeping some family and friends updated but wasn't in the mind set to officially "think" about what I wanted to write about. So Stephanie's surgery itself went fairly well and she was eating and drinking on the Monday and Tuesday after. However, by Wednesday she was spiking fevers and throwing up. She was already started on antibiotics after the surgery thank goodness! By Friday she was having trouble sitting up from what seemed like pain in her head. She would grimace and squint her eyes and grab her head.
The weekend proved much of the same...fevers up and down, not eating or drinking, didn't want to sit up or walk. The team decided to do some blood cultures to determine if there was an infection. We were told this Monday that the cultures were not accurate due to there already being antibiotics in the blood which hampered the bacteria from growing giving a possible false negative result for infection. Because of this and all her symptoms the doctors did still suspect meningitis and Stephanie will now be staying in hospital until at least August 11.
She had a PICC line inserted today which is a central line to just above her heart to administer the antibiotics directly. Apparently the drugs are very harsh on your veins. Even if this isn't meningitis, there certainly is/was some kind of process going on within Stephanie to make her ill...and I don't think it was just because she had surgery. It has now been 10 days post operation, her wound is mostly healed and she is only today finally starting to eat a little and sit up and walk without too much complaint!
As for seizure activity, I am happy to say that she definitely has less severe seizures now! They used to last a minute or two but now last anywhere from a couple seconds to 20 seconds or so. The big concern is when she is standing or walking will the seizures still cause her to drop. There is some evidence that she will still fall, since some of her seizures include tonic in both arms which means the seizure activity crossed over (generalized) to the other side of her brain. She is also having some new seizures that the neurologist actually said was a good thing. She is experiencing seizures where her head turns severely to the left and her eyes turn up and to the left as well. This means that the seizure activity is localized in one area and is starting on the right side of the brain. In future they may be able to do a grid placement on her brain to determine the exact location of where the seizures are originating from and possibly remove that part of the brain. For now though, let's hope that the corpus callosotomy was successful enough to save her from the drop seizures. If not, we may have to consider doing a complete callosotomy in the future (the surgeon only dissected 2/3 of the callosum).
I will be posting some pictures of Stephanie's experience tonight on a separate page on the sidebar. Also, Christa from Make-A-Wish dropped in last Friday for a nice visit and brought Stephanie a Jewel cd to enjoy during her recovery! Thanks Christa! (pic posted in Make-A-Wish gallery).
Long post, sorry! Pray that Steph does well the next week so we can go home!
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