Well remember that pressure sore? We went to our appointment with Dr. Sadanand, the neurosurgeon, today and he took one look at it and his face dropped. The open sore that I saw was very open indeed. What I saw when the scab came off was the shunt valve. We kept the wound covered and got the opinion of a plastic surgeon as to the best way to treat it, we knew that it needed to be treated immediately.

It was agreed that the wound would not heal with the valve stretching and irritating the skin. So surgery would be required. Dr. Sadanand called the OR and booked her in for immediate emergency surgery. He would be replacing the shunt valve with a new clean one, in case the one there had been exposed to bacteria and relocating it to just behind her ear, then he would clean the wound and cut away any infected tissue and stitch it closed.

We got into the OR in less than an hour. He took extra precautions to make sure that the wound was irrigated and disinfected to reduce the chance of any infection spreading into the shunt tubing when he changed the valve. Infectious disease was consulted and they agreed that the big gun antibiotics should be brought out again to keep any possible infection at bay. So they instilled antibiotics into her CSF while in the OR and we came home on Linezolid again. Cross your fingers that all cultures come back perfectly clean and that this incident will stay SMALL.

Surgery was a success and she recovered very well. Being that the surgery itself was minor and that the Pediatric ward in the hospital was exceptionally full today, Dr. Sadanand let us go home after she was out of recovery. We agreed that the risk of her catching some type of bug on the ward was not worth her staying over night. After all she was only requiring Tylenol for pain and he only wanted to watch her to make sure her pain was under control. So he sent us home with a prescription for Codeine just in case. After all she recovers better at home anyway.

So here we are at home, recovering once again. Lena is our little trooper. She recovers so well, she really is doing great. I think she almost feels better now that that stupid sore is closed. Geez it must have hurt and she didn’t even really let on.

Check out the picture below to see how much they have grown since they have come home. I took the one above tonight when we came home. The one below was taken on February 23rd, eight days after we came home from the NICU. They have grown so much, some days its hard to believe. When we went to get our RSV shots last Friday Lena was 17lbs 8oz and Kassie was 16lbs 4oz. WOW! pretty good for micopreemies.