Turns out he slipped a disc or something. I don’t fully understand it all, but he’s basically lost control of his front legs. The vet seemed to think it strange that it is the front and not the back legs but says he’s “cautiously optimistic.”

Rimmy got x-rays and then 3 shots including a sedative. We’re supposed to get him back in the morning along with medicine, including some steroids. Hopefully he will be fine, he’s such a good dog.

It was so weird coming home tonight and not having him there jumping all over us. Apparently jumping is what does it, though. Thinking back, I might know when he hurt himself, I think he tried to jump on the love seat over the arm and he couldn’t make the jump. That’s actually a common thing for him though. So who’s to say when it happened, or how, given the progressive nature.

So we’ll see in the morning… poor Rimmy… He’s never been sick or hurt in the 10 years we’ve had him…

She did well and had a pretty good recovery then napped some then even seemed to be herself for a while and now is sleeping. I am hoping she sleeps all night but the nurse just came in to give her some pain meds and check on her so she’ll probably be awake in no time. She’s a very light sleeper normally anyway.

She’s hoarse though, which I hate because it just sounds horrible. Hopefully that will go away soon. She doesn’t seem to, at this point, have noticed she has an incision, stitches, gauze, etc., on her left back. She keeps getting tangled up in her IV lines. I will be VERY glad when those are gone.

There’s a very tiny tube that is helping to drain the kidney, it goes right into her diaper. She’ll have that removed in 7-10 days, after the ureter has had some time to heal.

We have so much support, it’s awesome. My mom and brother are here and with Steve they are getting us some early lunch. My aunt works here and she has already been over to see us and said she would be by again. Our church’s associate pastor was here almost from the start and he sat with us for a little while and then prayed with us. He said that the men prayed for Kayleigh at their breakfast this morning at 6am. All sorts of texts and Facebook messages coming to my phone.

K was pretty cranky, I imagine she’ll be 5,000 times more so when she comes out of surgery. We think she is teething, she’s been pretty cranky the last couple of days and has a runny nose. Then add to that the fact that she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in a while and I think she remembers the hospital and that is upsetting her, too. THEN people were making her do things she doesn’t want to do like get her blood pressure taken. She screams bloody murder for any of that and even the hospital bracelet around her ankle was making her mad. Any time someone even looked at it she would freak out.

But every minute forward is a step towards this all being behind us…

Now it’s back to work. I brought my laptop specifically so I could work on photos from the wedding we recently shot. I figured, if nothing else, that would help me keep occupied and be thinking about something than what is going on right now in the operating room.

The other day we went for Kayleigh’s second annual renal scan, VCUG, and another ultrasound. As we’ve been seeing all along, her left kidney is enlarged and the ureter from it is quite kinked and twisted. She’s also had the reflux from the bladder up to the kidneys on both sides, graded as a 3 (so mid-grade). The doctor has been confident that the reflux will fix itself and, as we found out the other day, the right side has. That’s really good, however, her other kidney has shown no sign of improvement. It seems to be holding steady where it is, doesn’t seem to be worse, but it’s certainly not better.

To date, she has, thankfully, not suffered any infections. However, the doctor says that since the kidney has not gotten any better at this point, he does not expect that it will ever. He says that if it continues in this way, eventually it will start losing functionality. At this point, it functions fine – a little slower than the other kidney (I think he said 15 minute), but it functions. The doctor cannot predict when the kidney might lose function, it could be in a few months, it could be a couple of years. But he doesn’t want to risk that at all and has scheduled surgery on the ureter/kidney/bladder later this month. This surgery is to fix the ureter, straighten it up and fix the reflux from the bladder upward. Should we do nothing and the kidney start to lose functionality, she’d eventually have to have surgery to remove it, anyway. So it feels like a no-win situation, she’s going to have to have some surgery one way or another. So we will be following the doctor’s recommendation to fix this before it can get worse, and get this over with.

Needless to say, I’m nervous and I’m probably going to get more nervous as each day goes on. The surgery itself should not be very long but she will have to stay in the hospital one or two nights and there will be a relatively large incision in her back, and a tube to drain with from the incision. I’m not sure I totally understand that, but I know they will explain it better for me later. He talked like the tube would not be there long.

We are both worried, in addition to the surgery, about the hospital stay itself. There is no way Kayleigh is going to let someone make her sit in a bed for longer than 3 seconds. If she’s not sleeping, she’s on the go. I am worried about the tube a bit, too, because of her activity level but the doctor seems to think it won’t be a big deal. (I’m wondering how well he actually knows my child.)

I feel bad, too, that she has to go through all of this, especially without understanding why. The other day was the second time she’s undergone sedation since coming out of the NICU. Neither time was fun, far from it. Because of the sedation, she can’t eat for a good 8 hours or so beforehand and a little tiny kid like this does not understand why her parents aren’t feeding her, or why she can’t even have something to drink. She’s a good baby most of the time, really she’s quite good-natured, I cannot imagine how it would be with a crankier kid. We were to register at noon the other day and then go for her ultrasound (which she also screamed bloody murder during because she didn’t want someone to hold her down, even for something so non-invasive as that) then to be sedated and have the other two tests done. That would have put us around 12:30 if they got moving. We were seated in the waiting room after the ultrasound at 12:20 and the guy comes and tells us that we are set for “1:15 to 1:30.” Seriously!? A hungry child who hadn’t had anything to eat since about 5:30am and they were going to make her wait… in a children’s hospital! Just as I was starting to really boil, he came back and said that they were going to get us in “early.” Maybe they heard her crying and realized what they were doing to her, I don’t know, but it was a good thing.

This time was a little different, too, in that they didn’t just take her from us as she screamed. They said one parent could go back and be with her while they put the mask on. The mask would initially put her to sleep and then they would set the IV and catheter, administering the actual sedation medicine through the IV. So Steve indicated towards me and I kind of whispered that I didn’t know if I could – I was about to lose it at that point. He didn’t hear me and the anesthesiologist repeated what I said and I just burst into tears. So Steve went. He said it was nothing, that he was just there while she fell asleep, it was very quick. But he couldn’t look at me or he would lose it, too.

So if I am this upset about sedation with an IV and a catheter and a simple test with ultrasound or x-ray, whichever it is…? What am I going to do when they are going to be cutting my baby’s back open? Yes, this will be our second surgery, she had the fundoplication and the g-button put in shortly before coming home from the NICU, but I think this is harder than that was (on me). I don’t know why…

Since she’s so little, it was quite the involved process. Since there’s no way she could stay still for them to look at her brain, they had to sedate her a bit. Because of the sedation, she couldn’t eat after midnight the night before. And because of the sedation, she also had to get an IV and be intubated. It really sucked. When they picked us back up at the waiting room, she was already awake and screaming her head off. She’d started to move around so the anesthesiologist had to carry her so she didn’t hurt herself moving around in the bed. She kept looking at me and would start crying all over again.

It was aggravating, too, because we got a later start so she was really very hungry and cranky when it got started, then afterward, they made her wait a bit then gave her 2 ounces of Pedialyte and still made her wait some more before she could have some formula.

I was very thankful when it was all over.

Now we have to wait for the results. I’m trying not to be anxious about hearing them. They told me that within 48 hours the doctor would have them, so that would be by Friday, and now Monday is over and we still haven’t heard anything. I’m trying to remind myself that he probably has a lot of patients and maybe hasn’t had a chance to look at them yet.

I was also very thankful that I didn’t have to see my baby intubated again. When she was born, it became the every day. She had to have it all the time. Then it went away and a few days before coming home, she had her surgery. She came out of surgery still intubated for a while. It was hard enough then seeing my (relatively) big baby on a ventilator again. She’s not quite double now what she was then, I am glad the intubation was over before I had to see it this time.

K had her renal scan today, and what a day it was. We arrived at 11:15am. I’d skipped breakfast because I was in a hurry… I would live to regret that. Her appointment wasn’t until noon, but they wanted me to arrive at 11:30 for check-in. So, of course, I was early, and they were behind schedule. Surprise, surprise. I waited a bit, taking the time to feed Hungry Girl, then they checked us in and we go back to the waiting room. About ten after noon, some lady comes back to tell me it will probably be another 15 minutes, they’re running behind. Annnnnnd before I can stop her, this woman grabs my baby’s hand and starts oogling about how cute she is and rubbing her under one cheek. Of course, K is just eating up the attention and sitting there smiling and making noises. As soon as that woman left, out with the baby wipes to wipe any germs off. Sounds insane, but it’s what I’ve gotta do.

The woman 3 seats down from me was polite, however, she asked if she could look. So she came and looked from a decent distance and didn’t try to touch. I appreciated that. She was called away and another woman took the seat 2 down from me. She was wearing a surgical mask over her face, sort of had it pulled down. Immediately she’s talking to the woman across the aisle, of sorts, a very vocal woman who had been ranting about how long she’d been there, for one. She walked in right before I did, so I had been there just as long. She’s talking about her kid, saying he’s had some infection or something and they’ve had to drain fluid. I’m not paying attention, I was working on Sarah’s scarf (crochet), until I hear the words, “and I don’t know how contagious he is.” I tell you what, I didn’t need a mirror to know what my face looked like. I looked right at her with this utter shock then pulled my kid (in the stroller) closer to me and inched into the corner, lol. And at this, Surgical Mask says, “oh they got these masks up there, they’re so hard to breathe in though.” When I inched away, I guess she got the message, she put the mask on all the way and moved down another seat.

I mean… THINK A LITTLE PEOPLE. Gosh, it’s a friggin children’s hospital. You know you’re going to be surrounded by kids and babies. If you think you’re contagious or that your kid is, take some precautions instead of just joining everyone else.

Anyway… at least another 15 minutes later they took us back. I was not prepared for the long visit, first the waiting and then, “…it will take about an hour and a half…” I apparently still have Pregnancy Brain, I completely forgot they were going to have to give K an IV for this. I was still thinking of the test she had when in the NICU that was just a catheter.

However, despite there being two of them and my helping hold K down and doing my best to keep her calm, it still took about a half an hour to do the IV. Poor little baby. It’s so traumatic when you don’t know why things are happening, “WHY is there this pain in my hand?” Not to mention, it took two tries. They couldn’t get it in her left hand and ended up getting it in the arm. And not to mention, it always hurts worse when you tense up.

The poor little thing calmed down when that was over and she actually got to a happy place and was laying there “talking” up a storm, cooing and just plain being all happy. Then came the catheter. She screamed just as bad for this, maybe worse. It also took two tries. They had to call in someone else for this one. Poor poor little baby. When that was all done and she was ready to go, they strapped her down with these velcro straps. Pretty much all she could do was turn her head and wiggle her toes. They slid her in to the x-ray machine. I was able to give her a bottle as she lay there but she didn’t take much. She didn’t like being strapped down at first but she started to just look around and after a little bit fell off to sleep.

They ran some dye through her IV so they could watch on the computer screen what her kidneys would do as far as draining. This test went for 20 minutes. After that, it was sent up to the doctors who then decided that, yes, they wanted her to get the second one. So a doctor came in and gave K a diuretic then ran the test for another 25 minutes.

When all of that was said and done, she was slid out of the machine and that woke her up. Then it was time to unhook everything from her. I swear, she cried and screamed the most for removing the IV. Poor baby didn’t like the catheter being removed either but at least that was done very quickly. It was funny, too, that the little stinker managed to have a poopy diaper through all this. She’d had a lot of tape for her IV though so removing that was not fun and she ended up with a very sticky arm and blood on her sleeve.

While they sent the results to the doctors to review, I had a chance to run to the cafe since I hadn’t eaten yet. It was after 3 before I got down there and even then I had to stand by the sandwich counter forever while three guys ignored me, though they knew I was there. Finally I got some food and scarfed it before heading to the office.

Then, it was more waiting. Finally, though, the doctor came and he felt her kidneys, he said that even through all that and the fact that I’d fed her half a bottle again after her tests, he couldn’t feel that her kidneys were hard. Apparently this is a really good thing. He then showed me the images and explained how, and here is what it has taken me forever to say: K does not need surgery!!

The kidney that is bigger and holds more fluid apparently still functions at 47%. Sounds bad, but that’s 47 out of 50. The other kidney picks up that remaining 3% for a total of 53%. In other words, from what I understand, it means that the larger kidney functions perfectly fine, it’s just a little slower than the other. If you remember back to when she was in the NICU when they did the initial tests to see how the reflux was, the doctor there told me that he pegged that kidney to be at 10 to 15% functional. It’s nice sometimes, when doctors are wrong! But back to her children’s urologist, he believes that at least a big part of this is caused by the reflux up into that kidney. Apparently her ureter is quite twisted and kinked. He believes that both refluxes are grade 3′s instead of one being a 5, and that both will fix themselves within a few years. From what I understand, the area of the kidney that holds the fluid in the large kidney can get better as the reflux fixes itself and the ureter straightens out. He said there is a very low chance that K would need surgery. The only reason she should need surgery is if her reflux doesn’t start to fix itself. They’re going to follow her with periodic ultrasounds and she might have to have another renal scan in 12 to 18 months. So she’ll go back in December for an ultrasound and hopefully over time we will see improvement in the reflux.

I cannot say just how awesome this is, though. That little girl has been through so much in her short life so far, I am really glad she doesn’t need surgery. Of course, she will stay on the daily antibiotic to ward off infections until this clears up, but that’s nothing compared to surgery. I don’t mind going in so often for ultrasounds, either. :)