Twas the day after surgery...

...and all is going well! Mac is getting moved to the stepdown unit at some point this morning. He is recovering quite nicely. He came off the ventilator last night and was on a nasal cannula for about 12 hours, but is done with that now! He went ahead and kicked his i.v. out early this morning, and turns out he still needs it. Six sticks later, they still haven't been able to get one in. So, they're deciding if he will just get shots of medications he still needs, or if they will have to keep getting poked until they are successful. He's a total trooper about the process, though, so it really isn't as traumatic as it sounds. A word to the wise: a little sugar water on the tip of the pacifier will go a long way!

His surgery yesterday went a little differently than was expected. They started on the right hand side to place the new shunt into his right ventricle. They used the catheter from the shunt on the left hand side as a guide, as the CT scan showed that it was placed perfectly in his right ventricle, but just wasn't draining it enough to do the job. Once our dr. got in there, though, he found that the catheter from the left sided shunt was actually inside a cyst that was obstructing the two ventricles, rather than actually in the right ventricle. So, this means that they did not have to re-open his left side. We also found out that instead of being a kid whose pressure gets higher inside his ventricles as the fluid increases, his actually gets lower (don't ask me how that works, because I have no idea). This makes for a difficult situation because the one-way valves in the shunts only work under a certain amount of pressure. That, combined with the extensive number of cysts and debris inside his ventricles, is what is making this hydrocephalus so difficult to get a handle on. So, we're just doing what we can each day, but the impression I got is that we're far from being done with surgeries for many reasons. But, his CT scan this morning looked "superb"...a term that is not usually used to describe Mac's scans :), so we take what we can get, when we can get it! Good news is good news, for however long it lasts.

Hope that you are all doing well! Thanks for checking up on him!