It's been a little over a week since the last update and a lot has happened. First, just to let everyone know, Lyra is doing fine. She's still in the PICU, but a number of things have been weaned off of her and she's resting comfortably.
In the last update, I explained that Lyra was having some issues regarding the clotting of her blood and that she had been put on some anti-coagulating medication in response to this.
She was on that medication for a few days and then another cath was performed, which they basically just took a couple of pictures to see how the actions done during the previous cath had held up. The good news was that her pulmonary arteries had not clotted off and were open. The bad news was that the ballooning of one side had caused a small tear and resulted in a pseudoaneurysm. Her doctors feel confident that the pseudoaneurysm is contained well and should clot off and resolve on it's own, but there were some scary discussions about what could happen if it didn't.
The second problem that cropped up was that she has developed an immune response to one of the drugs used to keep her blood from clotting. It's widely used in just about everything, from keeping her IVs open, to keeping the lines open during caths and therapeutically to keep the areas affected by the surgery from clotting too much. So, this has become a pretty big hassle as Lyra now clots pretty quickly, meaning that her lines (like IVs, but some are longer, and have more than one "port") don't last very long.
It's been about a week since this problem was discovered and since then much has improved. Lyra has gotten a lot of the excess fluid out of her body and is starting to finally look more like herself. She has had a few technical difficulties associated with her lines, needing them replaced, or reopened if possible, etc.
They're slowly working on weaning her off of the ventilator, which would be great, because then Maren and I might be able to hold her. Things are moving forward, maybe at a glacial pace, but progress is progress.
Finally, the address to this site has changed, so please update your bookmarks. The other address will continue to work for a while longer.
The new address is:
Posted by Tim at November 11, 2004 01:09 PM