Patience is a virtue...

Monday, January 5

Yep, patience... a virtue I really don't possess. They stopped Faith's feeds again on Sunday morning, after they took another abdominal x-ray and discovered (hopefully) the real reason for her continued vomiting. Dave and I were getting ready to leave to go to Loveland for the day and work on getting things done at our house, so things will be a little more ready when Faith can actually go home. As we were getting the last of our things together, I noticed that Faith's TPN was back at 18 mL/hr, when it had been at 9. I wanted to think it was a mistake, but decided we should wait around until the nurse got back from eating lunch so we could ask her about it. When we did, she told us they had made Faith NPO again, and that as soon as we saw the x-ray, we'd understand why.

So, she took us to her computer and showed us the x-ray (they're all digital now, it's pretty cool), and we could see that 24 hours after the contrast study, Faith still had quite a bit of barium in her stomach (that was actually from her intestine) and in one place in her intestine. There were little spots of barium past that area, but it was pretty obvious from that picture that she has some type of an obstruction going on still.

So, we had to wait all day yesterday to hear from surgery what their plan would be. Then I waited most of the day today, to hear from surgery what their plan would be. I saw them twice this morning, but Dr. Sandoval (and Dr. Karrer) could only tell me that they needed to talk to Dr. Partrick and see what he thought. Finally around 7:00 tonight, Dr. Sandoval came in to tell me about their plan. They are going to start irrigating Faith from the bottom twice a day. They are thinking that her intestines might still be plugged up with stuff that's not moving through like it should, and so they think that if they can flush some of that out, then things will move better. Dr. Sandoval did the first irrigation tonight, but didn't get a whole lot out.

Dr. Partrick came shortly after Dr. Sandoval left and talked to me in a little more detail about the plan. He said that he thinks a lot of Faith's problems stem from the size of most of her intestine. He said the fact that so much of her intestine is very small around, but one section is dilated, makes it harder for things to get through, and that the small part just isn't working as well as it normally would, and since it isn't working that well and things aren't getting to that section as much, it isn't getting stretched out to the size it should actually be. He said that the intestinal issue is probably contributing largely to the vomiting, particularly the projectile vomiting, because it is easier for everything to just come back up, rather than push through that narrow section of bowel.

So, we will wait some more. This is the part of gastroschisis that I didn't want to think would happen to us, this waiting forever for her intestines to work like they should. Then once we're done waiting on that, we will wait for her to show us she can handle eating... I came to the realization this morning that it seems like maybe God is trying to teach us something through all of this, and we're just not getting whatever it is He wants us to learn. It just seems like things start to get better and everyone is optimistic, and then something comes along that no one expects... like God is saying, "Oh, wait, you didn't learn your lesson, you can't be done yet!" I can think of a couple of things I should be learning from this... the patience thing for one, and also to let go of my desire to always be in control and realize the only one who is truly in control is God.

Faith hasn't thrown up much today, only three times, and they weren't very big. No one is sure if it's because she's not eating, or if it's the Prevacid starting to work. Either way, it's nice that she seems more comfortable.