Infection

Infection. That seems to be a very common theme around Eli the past few weeks. Dr. Kayton told me after the surgery that Eli had a LOT of infection and that the inner stitches did indeed have to come out and be redone after cleaning. In fact, there was so much infection that he didn’t feel comfortable putting in the wound vac yet. So he cleaned out the wound and packed it full of gauze. Tomorrow, Dr. Kayton will put Eli to sleep for a few minutes, long enough to change out his gauze and put fresh in. He will do this every day until the infection looks to be all cleared up. Hopefully this will happen by Friday, and if so, we will be back to the Operating Room on Friday to get the wound vac installed. The wound vac will have to be changed Monday, Wednesday and Friday of next week as it heals the wound. Eli will have to have it in place for 7-10 days. He also has another drain in his stomach to hopefully get rid of any infection that might build up between rounds of repacking new gauze each day.

Thankfully (another answer to prayer), things went well and Eli was able to come up to the POU instead of going to the PICU across the street. He did have an NG tube (we all know how happy that made him), but at least he didn’t have a catheter, so we kept focusing on that positive. We are hoping the NG tube can come out within the next day or so. Eli’s comment shortly after he woke up was, “Daddy, I don’t understand. I don’t understand why I have to do this every day.” It took me a second to answer because my first thought was, “Yeah, buddy, I don’t understand either.” I told him it was because he kept getting infections and the doctors wanted to make sure his belly was better. Based on our conversation last night, I probably could have explained James, Thessalonians and 1 Peter to him where we see that trials allow you the opportunity to persevere and cling to your faith and give glory and honor to God. However, he was still pretty out of it from the anesthesia, so I opted for the easy answer and that seemed to appease him.

The infectious disease group seems to think we have too many antibiotics going and want to see culture results so they can narrow it down to an appropriate combination of drugs to nail whatever infection might still be there. Thankfully, he seemed to have good bowel sounds and movement in the last 24 hours. In fact, before we did the dressing change and found the infection, he was being moved to no eating restrictions. Of course, that goes out the window now. One concern of ours is going to be pain tolerance. Eli’s last day of Toradol was today because you are only supposed to have it up to 5 days after surgery. So now they are depending on narcotics, which can slow down his bowels. We’re going to ask about Motrin (thanks, Sarah) and see what else they can recommend besides Morphine and Dilaudid.

Our prayer requests include getting rid of that infection once and for all, for a quick healing with the wound vac, that his pain will be kept to as minimal as possible, and that we can get out of here safely and back to doing 3F8 treatments quickly. Thanks to everyone for once again being on call for emergency prayer requests and for being there for us. A special thanks to our “family” at the Ronald and our friends in town (Mary/Barbara/Redmonds) for coming to our side today (and so many other days) to help us out or just visit with us even when we didn’t ask for it. We thank God for each one of you that He has strategically placed in our lives.