Day 22- Go, Fight, Win, Emmy!

We stopped the Vecuronium- the paralytic- yesterday, and Emerson started moving her fingers and toes yesterday afternoon.  This morning, while in her moon boots- the OT splints- we propped her legs up on her stuffed animals and she kept kicking her legs off of them.  She was being a stinker!  We bathed her this morning and I kept asking for a pat-pat and she would pat my hand with her right hand.  When we prop up her arms with stuffed animals, she likes to rub them.  While she is still sedated, she tries to wake up when she hears our voices.  One of the residents gets frustrated because she will ask Emerson to open her eyes or try to get her to move, and Emmy won't do it.  But then Brian or I will ask her to do something and she will.  When she hears our voices, she squints and raises her eyebrows.  One of of the nurses says that kids fight the sedation when they hear their parents because they want their parents so badly.  It is so cute and sad.  So we will spend some time talking with her, like during the bath, but then we want her to rest, so we get her all comfortable and turn out the lights and try to whisper or read or update the blog. 

Surgery and PICU say her stomach feels soft.  This is a really good thing.  It also looks like air is beginning to move through her intestines, which is a good sign as well.  Her lungs look a little wet, which is common after abdominal surgery because the stomach cannot yet absorb everything, so they gave her Lasiks to help her pee it out.  She is a peeing champ.  She broke her record yesterday, which was 102 cc in two hours, by peeing 134 cc in two hours. 

There are increasted ET tube (edotracheal tube) secreations but they are clear and/or white.  This, too, is not a bad thing because she is coughing again- a good thing!- and that causes some more secreations.  Emmy, though, gets aggravated because she has to have the tube cleared and this causes her to gag and tear and get angry.  She hates to have her tube cleared.  I like to see her get fiesty though.

Emmy had a fever of 101.3 last night. Again, this isn't necessarily bad because the fevers are trending downward- they are lower in temperature and less often- and she responds to the Tylenol, so we are less worreid about those.  We- I always say "we" like Brian and I actually do anything but by "we" I mean mostly the amazing nurses here- are keeping track of how many boluses (bolusses?  boli?) she receives of morphine today in addition to her drip.  We are not going to start weaning her today, but we want to start weaning her from her drip tomorrow, and we need to know how much morphine she seems to require right now in addition to the drip so that it is a slow wean. 

Surgery gave us the all clear to work with her on the exercises OT and PT gave us.  Emmy is resting very comfortably right now, but our plan is to wake her up this afternoon a bit and do her exercises.  Her left arm is much more edematous than it was before the surgery and it seems stiffer, too.  Both OT and PT said we want to keep her loose, so we are going to work with her and then read to her and let her rest again. 

Oh yeah!  Some of you might be worried still about that left leg.  The heat pack on the opposite leg worked and her left leg and foot slowly warmed up again.  We are thinking that it was probably due to a shift in fluid in the body that caused all that, but we are going to keep an eye on it today just in case. 

Brian and I feel really good about her recovery from this surgery.  She seems to be doing well in all respects.  We are feeling pretty optimistic right now.