Sophie's World

9:00 PM: It's been a good day for all of us. Randall and I met with one of the residents to get an update. There's still really no more specific information from the lab about the bacteria. They are treating the bacteria that grew out of blood culture by exposing samples of it to various types of antibiotics to see which ones (or combinations of them) are most effective, but there are no results yet. Until then, they are using vancomycin, which appears to be making a difference, so the chances are good she will continue on that. Unfortunately, they are finding that in order to get her to the right levels, they are going to have to start administering it every 4 hours instead of every 8 (which means that if we go home, we would have to administer it just as frequently there--that's a lot of getting up in the middle of the night). We really should hear something tomorrow about whether they feel they should start additional antibiotics. The impression we get from the attending physician is that multiple IV antibiotics would be hard to manage at home. We honestly dn't know what to hope for at this point. The resident said she would be surprised if we would be ready to go home tomorrow. That's okay. There's been no more discussion of taking her line out. I think we'll probably just see how she does once we get over this. If she gets another line infection, we can revisit the issue then.

Elisabeth and our friends came up to see Sophie tonight. The girls got to go up to the huge recreational therapy playroom and had it all to themselves (Sophie can't be around other kids right now, so they reserved the whole thing for her). They had a great time, and Sophie got to bring a couple of toys back to play with. While the girls played, we had dinner with Patti and Bob in the cafeteria (the food is surprisingly good and very reasonably priced--less than $20 for all four of us). Elisabeth headed home with them just before 7:00 and will stay at their house tonight. Randall and I will see whether we can manage to share this supposedly "double" sleeper. It's nice to be able to spend so much time together. Normally one of us is either coming from dropping Elisabeth off at school or leaving to pick her up, so 3-4 hours is usually the most we get.