Hospital Day 11

After losing so many battles this last week, it was all I could do to stay somewhat sane yesterday. I just wanted to go home and be with my babies. We'd been at the hospital eight days longer than anticipated and I was DONE! This quote so perfectly summed up my emotions. And physically, yesterday was the absolute most painful day of this ordeal since headaches started April 24th. A CT showed that my brain is swollen, I had air pockets hroughout my brain, and some intraventricular bleeding. All of those things can add up to a pretty craptastic headache, but they aren't necessarily unusual. I had he same thing happen in June, but not the revision is August. But things calmed down and I had a GREAT night and get to be discharged today with as needed follow up over the next several days, weeks, and months. But just to catch you up, here's what I been doing...

On Wednesday, Oct 12th, I came to the UofU hospital because my six-week old shunt was failing. We assumed my shunt had clogged and wasn't draining as much CSF as it should have been. The surgery would've lasted 15 minutes to replace the broken shunt and I would have been discharged the next day.

But the shunt wasn't clogged. It was obvious, though, that the shunt pressure valve setting wasn't allowing enough CSF to drain, so I still needed surgical intervention. And instead to using whatever random shunt and set it to whatever random pressure setting, we decided to run some intracranial pressure tests for a week to see the pressure at which my brain is happiest so that if I had to be shunted again, we'd know exactly what would work best.

Three days ago, we all pow-wowed and decided to take a look in the brain. The pediatric neurosurgeon who performed the last surgery I had in college that kept me brain-surgery-free for 13 years (and based on my shunt history, y'all understand why that 13 years was such a big ol' deal) came to assist my adult neurosurgeon during my surgery. Unfortunately, there is a bunch of scar tissue behind the hole made 13 years ago that is preventing the CSF a natural passageway of flow. My basilar artery is also behind my third ventricle and one nick of that vein and the surgery would have been over with a quickness.

Soooo, using the ICP data we collected last week, I was given a new shunt that we're hoping will last a lot longer than the last five.

The shunt was initially working great for several hours after surgery, but by Friday morning, we knew something was wrong. Thankfully it's an easy fix. They used an external magnetic device to adjust the pressure setting and I can also slow the flow of CSF by laying down flat. This will need more fine tuning, but I can do that on an out patient basis.

Soooo ... Buh-bye hospital! I'm coming home!!!