Who knew? If you want to get out of the hospital, you just need enough blood in you and enough poop out of you.
That’s it.
The Little Lady’s blood transfusion worked WONDERS on her. We saw improvement about halfway through the four hour process; she instantly became a different child — teasing her Daddy, talking to her visitors, stealing french fries, and even throwing out a few dance moves.
It feels a bit like an understatement but it was wonderful to see.
The rest of the night, however, wasn’t quite so lovely. She had enough blood in her body, but now there was the issue of having a bit too much “poo-poo” built up . . . nearly 6 days worth.
Oy ve.
The poor thing didn’t fall asleep until nearly 4:00 am, only to keep waking every 45 minutes from the pain. At 7:00 am this morning, three of her doctors showed up to tell us that unless the new labs showed her hemoglobin count to be up . . . AND she had a bowel movement . . . we should NOT anticipate going home today.
“Well, crap, ” was my first thought.
Out came a lovely selection of laxatives and suppositories, all administered by our sweet nurse. That’s right –Mommy didn’t have to be “The One” handling the suppository duties; there are some bright moments when one is in the hospital. Of course, like with every other procedure, I was the one to hold her.
Oh, my goodness — holding your child through suppositories, transfusions, blood draws, and IV attempts SUCKS.
(I’m sure, if given time, I could come up with a more tasteful way to say that. . . .but, right now, I really don’t care. Being hormonal and emotional, with only 12 hours of sleep over the course of a week, leaves one not really caring if one is crass or not. My apologies if anyone are offended (Mom).)
Fortunately, the new blood work revealed that the Little Lady’s count had reached the ideal, normal level.
Now . . . it was just a matter of “Da Poo.”
I’ll spare you the details — but, for the Little Lady, it was excruciating and a many-hour process. The End Result (ha ha) was that the Little Lady was given permission to leave Texas Childrens Hospital.
She is still incredibly tired, bruised from her catheter and stint, and struggling to use her healing stomach muscles, but she is home and, overwhelmingly, happy to be here.
Mommy is, also, just a wee bit happy to be home.
Thank you so much for all of the comments that have been left this week — it was so encouraging to read that people (some I know and some I’ve never met) were thinking and praying for us.
Of course, OF COURSE, coming home wasn’t the most relaxing thing since (1) my husband is now convinced he has Mumps (thanks to learning Friday that we were all exposed to it while in recovery) and (2) the first thing I managed to do at home was to dump 3 weeks worth of rabbit poo all over my feet.
Yeah — OF COURSE that happened at the END of the most stressful week ever.
