« 5/2/06 | Main | 5/4/06 »

5/3/06

9:30 PM: Well, Randall left tonight to head up to Virginia. He'll probably get there just before midnight. I already miss him! The girls behaved really well after he left, and I'm feeling pretty patient, so we enjoyed ourselves.

A couple of issues we're keeping our eye on with Sophie. OPne thing is that she seems to have developed some kind of rash. It started with bumps (they look like pimples) on her face that we noticed yesterday when we picked her up from school. Then today, the bumps had spread to her chest and arms and the skin around the bumps is redder and more irritated-looking. She says it doesn't itch (and is clearly tired of us asking her if it does). Randall called the doctor this afternoon, who suggested we give her benadryl. But when we told her about Sophie's paprdoxical (hysterical) reactions to benadryl, she said we cold try doubling her zyrtec (giving it to her in the morning as well as at night). I'm skeptical that it will help, but we'll give it a try tomorrow. I have to go in to work tomorrow after I get the girls dropped off, so I hope it doesn't get so bad that ehr day care feels she needs to be picked up.

The second thing we're kind of worried about is that her chest catheter seems to be getting "stopped up" somehow. We first noticed it when Amy came to do the blood draw last Thursday. She was eventually able to get blood to come out, but it took a while. Then when I tried to flush her line over the weekend, I absolutely couldn't push or pull with the saline. That has happened twice before and we had to take her to an ER to administer a special "clot-busting" medicine. Randall called the doctor, who asked whether we had tried having Sophie put her arms over her head (sometimes the line gets kinked). I tried that while Randall was still on the phone and with a little pressure, I was able to get the saline to flow. But then Randall was worried that I might have just pushed a clot into her bloodstream. Time to panic! So we called the doctor again, and he said I probably should have pulled instead of pushing but that if it had been a clot, she would have had immediate respiratory distress (because the clot would have gone into her lungs). Since she seemed fine, we breathed a sigh of relief and learned our lesson. When I flushed the line on Monday, I didn't have any trouble at all. Tonight, unfortunately, I had the same problem again. I had her stand on the floor, put her arms over her head and kind of pulsed the syringe as a I pushed, ever so gently. With hardly any pressure, I got the saline to go in. Then I used a second syringe to check her blood return (make sure I could pull blood out as well as push the saline in). And then I put in a little extra heparin (which fills her line and prevents clotting) just to be sure. It seems like this must be a kinking issue and not a clotting issue, but I'm going to call the doctor and see if there's something I can do before Friday (when I need to flush her line again) or if there's any kind of test they can do when we go in this Tuesday. Are your eyes glazing over yet??