The wound...

It is remarkable what one day will do.  Lily is doing so well!  She seems so much more herself today than she has in a long time, smiling and laughing and most importantly eating, and eating well at that.  I  haven't seen her eat this well since the first day she ate after her last surgery!  Hopefully this appetite keeps up, then we can get her off her blood thinner shots and go to something oral! 

I see how good she is looking and can't even begin to imagine how awful that infection was making her feel!  She has a morphine infusion again and they will probably start to ween it tomorrow.  It just sucks that this wasn't picked up before.  Unfortunately there were always reasons to be sore and uncomfortable and for different things to be showing up in bloodwork.  There was no reason to suspect there was an infection under there because her incision had healed soo nicely.

Today I was present for her dressing change and had been warned by my mother in law what to expect, as she was the one with her last night when it was done.  They did not close up the incision, instead they left it open and have two sutures placed about an inch and a half apart just to keep her skin somewhat closed.  So we are left with three 1-1.5inch openings and at some points look .5cm deep. At the moment they pack it with saline soaked sterile gauze twice a day.  I couldn't believe how well she did while they changed it. It obviously hurt and she whimpered but did not at all need to be restrained while it was done.  It was awful to see.  It is deep and well, just gross to be honest.  They are going to set her up with a wound vac on Monday.  That is basically a vacuum sealed dressing that sucks out any grossness with a suction it has a little canister that she can clip onto her pants.  They say it heals quicker that way.

This area will close from the bottom surface of tissue up to the top so will obviously not leave her with the nice scar line like she had before.  And here I was a little bummed that they had not followed the same incision as her last surgery so she had two lines.  This scar will heal and look really bad, the dr.s said in a few years you can get cosmetic surgery to fix it.  I absolutely will not put her through that.  I plan on raising her to be proud of those scars, all of them, and if she wants to do something about it when she is old enough to make that decision for herself, then that is fine.  I never try and cover up her scars because I don't want her to ever think that she should have to, or ever feel embarrassed of them.  

Hopefully we have an uneventful weekend!