It's Been A Year

I don't have a lot to say tonight since I said a lot yesterday, but I couldn't let today go unnoticed. There's a lot of remembering to be done this week as it was a life changing week for us last year. So bear with me and all the retrospectives.

It's been one year since Emma had her first shunt surgery! By this time last year, we were already back home after spending the day at Children's Hospital and then back in the NICU getting her settled, trying to figure how to handle our little sweet pea while she was puffy from IV fluids, hopped up on morphine and even more fragile because of the incisions on her head and belly.

Here's a link to last year's post about her surgery.
http://theleghorns.blogspot.com/2008/09/emmas-surgery.html

I don't think I ever posted the pictures of what she really looked like that day. It was hard to believe how much different she looked than when she went in. A purple mark on her temple was made to indicate which side of her head should be prepped for surgery. Hours of fluid being pumped through her IV left her face swollen, making her look like a much chubbier version of herself. An area where hair once covered her head now was marred by a half-moon shaped incision covered by a taped piece of gauze.

By the next day, she was feeling better and looking like herself with the exception of the evidence of her new equipment.

Again, I'm not sure I ever gave much information about her 'equipment' so here you go.

Emma has a Medtronic Strata Valve. This is the main component in her shunt. It's what can be felt on the back her head and is what regulates the flow of her cerebral spinal fluid (CSF). On one end is a short rigid catheter that goes through her skull and brain into her right lateral ventricle. A long flexible silicone catheter is attached to the other end running down the back of her neck, over her shoulder, down the right side of her abdomen and into her peritoneal cavity (the space between many of her organs). There is a small incision on her belly that marks where it goes into that space. A small ridge can be seen along the path of the catheter, but if you didn't know it was there, you might think it was just a vein, if you even noticed it.

Here is a diagram giving a rough idea of what it looks like on the inside. Emma has a VP shunt, but like the picture indicates, some people of a VA (venticular-aortal) shunt.

So maybe I did have a lot to say today. More than I realized, at least. That happens to me ... frequently. Today her shunt is just part of life and we really don't think about it that often. Okay we think about it very often, but we don't worry about often. Most days, I run my finger tips over her shunt on the back of her head, partially afraid that I will feel it becoming fluid filled as it was for so long, but on many days, I never even think to touch the area. I see the catheter running down the side of her body each time I change her clothes, her diaper or give her a bath, but it's only once in awhile that I really stop to realize that it's not 'normal' and think about what it really means.

This date last year was a big day, eventful to say the least. I can say, though, that this year, our day was rather uneventful and aside from the fact that her shunt kept her CSF flowing and prevented the pressure from building in her brain, her shunt made no difference in her day. I don't think today would have been any different had she not needed that surgery one year ago. As my friend Sayward commented on yesterday's blog, 'God is good.'