May 26th — Hospital Day 8
Eli started the day a little sad when he found out Rachel was not his nurse today. She will not be back until Saturday and he is already looking forward to it. It is sweet and also says a lot about the bond they have built.
The main medical event today was a CT scan to check whether the fluid leaking from his head was spinal fluid or anything more serious. This was actually the first time Eli has had a CT scan without being fully sedated. They gave him Versed, which is a medication that helps relax and calm him, but we do think it was given a bit too early. By the time we actually got to the scanner he was starting to come out of it, and he was pretty worked up. It was a hard few minutes. He was also NPO for a stretch afterward just to make sure the images were clearly readable, which made him cranky since he could not eat. Once we got the all clear that the images came out well, he got to eat some pizza with a little vitamin C sprinkled under the cheese, which made him happy.
The results from the CT came back and were actually reassuring. The fluid near the surgical site looks stable compared to his MRI from May 21st, with no new bleeding and no signs of anything more serious developing. The radiologist did note some motion artifact in the images from Eli moving around during the scan, which honestly tracks given how the scan went. But the important thing is that nothing new or alarming showed up.
After that we headed to the ball room, which has really become our little oasis here. Because Eli is in isolation, it is one of the only other places he can go, and we genuinely treasure the time we spend there together.
Later in the evening we gave him some Ativan and the team tried to wrap his head with a compression dressing. A little while after that we went to redress his PICC line, and with everything going on and the Ativan having worn off by then, he ended up rolling the compression dressing right off his head during all the commotion. We were not going to fight him on it.
Instead, I put together something that seems to be working pretty well. We used some Coban and wrapped gauze around his forehead like a headband just to keep him comfortable and give us something to work with. Then I made a thick gauze pad with medicated gauze on the bottom and Hypafix on top to hold it in place, and used medical tape running from one side of the headband over the top of his head to the other side to apply gentle compression directly over the wound. The idea is to close up the space between his skull and his skin so fluid does not have a pocket to collect in. It is not the prettiest thing in the world but it seems to be doing its job, and he is not bothered by it at all. We are going to leave it on for two days and see how things look from there.
Thank you for every prayer. We feel them.
🩶🦁🧠 #RoaringForEli
