Home Sweet Home

We are home. We finally got into the MRI around 2pm. He wasn't thrilled with it but dealt with it like a champ. Only a few tears and held my thumb like it would fall off. 3 scans total. Two 30 second scans and one 50 second scan. I think we were in the bore for less than 4 minutes. Back up to the pedi floor and straight to "RIDE". I believe Ben and I walked close to 4 miles in a space that is about 100 yards long. He's smiling and giggling the whole time. It was good that we were able to keep him happy. There was a wagon, red Flintstone like car, and another push car he took turns playing in. The Flintstone car has one side with a working door. Tyler preferred to get in and out of the side where the door doesn't open. By the end of the day, he wanted to play "Dukes of Hazards" by sliding into the Flintstone car through the back window. He really did entertain the staff on the pedi floor today.

Tyler's head is ok. He did hit the floor hard enough to cause a small subdural hemorrhage, a bleed between the skull and the brain matter. Yes, this kid knows how to make his brain bleed. It is very small and there seems to be no new brain damage. We stayed in the hospital long enough to make sure the bleed clotted off and wasn't getting any bigger. Having a shunt makes a normal head injury a little more tricky. We also had to make sure the shunt wasn't draining too much fluid that the damage area would be made worst. His neurosurgeon was very happy to see him run around the floor and talk up a flirty storm. So as long as (knock on wood now) he doesn't have any new symptoms pop up over the next couple of weeks we can wait til June to see Neurosurgery again. We have a routine RSV shot in 2 weeks, where we will do an informal 2 week check. If the Neonatalogist has any concerns then about his head she will refer us back up to Lebanon.

For now, we are to keep him quiet and calm. He has doctor orders not to let anything bang his head for a while. Not just for the obvious, but because his head needs to heal. We've moved his high chair basically into a corner making it incredibly difficult for it to fall. Tyler was so excited to be home he raced from one activity to the next with no regard to his head. My favorites were trying to push the high chair over again but it was in the corner and banging his plate repeatedly over his head. Any one have a bubble ball for toddlers?

5 am and old habits die hard

A month shy of my 2 year annivery in this place, I'm awake at 5 am waiting for rounds. In many ways it seems so long ago. So much has happened over the last 23 months. Yet the drone of this hospital hasn't changed a bit. DaRT has flown off and back now twice. We have a great view of the airfield. Nurses still come in at all hours to wake a sleeping patient for silly stuff like blood pressure and temperature. Have to admit ours is a great one tonight. Tyler went right back to sleep after the midnight one and barely woke up for the 4am check. And there is no way to get away from the bells and heavy feet walking in the halls. We are in the regular pedi unit at least. It is quite a bit quieter than the critical care units. But the bells still run chills down my back after 19 months. Ben is taking his turn on the Guantanamo approved torture, I mean sleeping device. Because the unit is farily full we only have one, thank God. I'm eternally thankful that I didn't have to sleep on that when I was sitting in the Birth Pavilion. I also have a deeper understanding of how much Ben really loves me to spend all those nights on one of those things while I was sitting in the Birthing Pavilion. We won't even mention what they try to pass off as food here. We ran into one of our favorite nurses last night from the ICN. Tyler showed off all his stuff for her. Walking, climbing, talking; acting like the normal 21 month he is. It was a smiley good visit all around. I have no clue if they round up here and when. Truly we haven't seen a doctor since neurosurgery came last night. We found the exact spot Tyler landed on his head. We were cleaning him up from a make shift dinner and noticed a soft squishy spot on the side of his head. We assumed he hit the back of his head, nope he hit the side. The squishy spot is just one massive bruise forming in an area that doesn't have a lot of fat tissue. His skull is fine and the bruise is right above the area in question so it all fits. We don't know what time he'll go in for an MRI yet. I've half expected him to have already gone before the normal appointments get started. But for now, I'm content listening to the snore of my baby boy and wondering how Rachel gets any sleep (They share a room still).

"Good lord! Look at the size of those ventricles."

At 10 minutes to 9 am I was feeding Tyler breakfast and eating myself. When I reach over to get his cereal box and hear Thump!, Waaaaaa! Tyler had kicked the kitchen table so hard that his high-char fell over. He took a pretty hard bump on the head. He cried right away (a good sign). He had his 6-month eye follow-up yesterday so we had a hard time telling if his slow pupil reaction was a result of being dilated for the exam or the whack on his head. So off to the ED we go.

After the fall tyler is overall acting just fine. Walking, talking, hungry not vomiting. The only real concern we had was the bug hit to his head and the slow response of his pupils to light.

On the way to the ED Sharron and I were going over the standard medical history speech. We had to laugh when we realized that we both put pauses in about the same places so that the audience has moments to absorb, react or ask us to define acronyms. You know that you have a complex case when it takes 15 minutes to refresh yourself on the whole spiel.

Things in the ED go as we would expect. The ED was slow, so they jumped us right over triage into a bed. After 20 minutes of the Tyler medical history show the Dr came in and decided to order a head CT. While waiting for the results of the CT we hear that same doctor make some exclamation about large ventricles. When he came in to go over the results he stated carefully explaining that his ventricles were larger than normal, and that it may be "normal" for him with his history. It should be noted that this was the first head imaging that SNHMC has done on him so they had no point of reference. So we did what we always do, asked to see the films. Apparently "normal" parent's aren't interested in seeing diagnostic images of their child's head injuries. When we see them we both blurted out that we thought his ventricles looked smaller than our last appointment with neurosurgery. This was enough to make the ED doc decide to call our friends in Neurosurgery. After some back and forth they decide to send us home.

About an hour after we get home Sharron gets a call. The ED doc decided to discharge us without clearing it with radiology. We were to report up to Lebanon and see Neurosurgery. Radiology didn't like something that they saw in the CT scan. So here we are. The ED here is so full we get the first quick exam in the waiting room. The Neurosurgery crew compared the images we brought up with us. It appears that there was something that needs a closer look.

The bright white bullet shaped object is part of the tube of his shunt the white circle is bone, the light grey is brain and the dark grey is ventricle fluid. The area of concern is the small light shadow next to his skull just to the left of the shunt tube. It could be new today, or just new since his last MRI. Based on the color the docs suspect that it is most likely blood.

They are going to keep him here overnight for observation and a quick MRI in the morning to make sure everything is good to go.