# 8

No, this is not the number of kids Dave and I have decided to have:-) It is the number of times Ellie has gone to the operating room now. It's been a busy few months for Ellie, all of which I'll update on later, but medically we've had a few issues to deal with. Last month, we made a trip down to Children's Mercy because her button site (located in her intestine and where we hook up her tube) looked really red and angry and she was running a little fever (100). Ellie rarely runs a fever so I thought maybe the site was infected. Our ped. let us put her on antibiotics and away we went to KC. The nurse practicioners (NPs) looked at it and so did the wound care nurses. They decided to change out her button and put in a new one and we were taught a new way to care for her site until the leaking stopped. This all went great and the leaking went down some and then a couple weeks later it all started again. So 3 weeks ago, I called and talked to the NPs again and sent them this photo:

Ouch!!! Right? Yeah, they called back immediately and told us to come back in. They gave us a new way to take care of her site but still didn't know why it was leaking so much. On the way home, Dave suggested maybe it was because she was eating and drinking so much now (16 oz plus whatever she eats!). Made sense to me. Then last week, one of her stitches that has been working it's way out for the last year, finally got infected (the pimple by her belly button in the picture). Back to KC we went. We saw her surgeon this time and he tried to take the stitch out but couldn't get to it. He said he'd rather put her to sleep than torture her to get to it. We asked him about the leaking too and he agreed with Dave. He had only two suggestions: Take the button out and use an NG tube (nose to stomach) for the 4 oz of water she gets daily or deal with it until we reach our no tube goal (20 oz of fluid and gaining weight). I went with the deal with it option. A year of passing tubes through Ellie's nose was enough for me.

So we made an appt. for Ellie to get her stitches out this past Monday. We had to go through all the same operating room procedures including kissing her goodbye as the nurses took her away. This part never gets easy. Even though it was the simplest operation she's undergone yet, it's still an operation. There's always a risk (we found out the hard way last year). But 25 minutes later, it was all done. He took out the infected stitch, along with another that was working it's way out. He said there was one more he could feel but it was in the muscle and he didn't want to accidentally cause a hernia. So, I looked at Dave on the way home Monday and said, "So does this count as # 8?". His reply," Yep." If only they all could have been this easy. More updates later, but I'll leave you with this: