She walked today!!!

7:15 pm

Hi all,

It has been a hard day for Molly but she is progressing as she should be. This morning, bright and early, Dr. Hey came in with Evangeline,

and wheeled in a large flat screen tv screen and brought a bag full of dvds to watch for her and the boys. She hasn’t watched one yet as she sleeps most of the day but she wants to she said, if she could only keep her eyes open. She is also still quite swollen from all the fluids they are pumping into her body and from her surgery. But it is slowly going down.

(She’ll just love that the doll from her youth is in this shot. “Bitty Baby” made the trip with us just for old times sake and support. She wants you all to make sure you know she doesn’t normally sleep with her doll anymore!!!!!)

Dr. Hey also brought with him his videocamera, the videotape of her surgery (graphic but oh, so cool to see how they fixed her!) and a blank tape for us to use to videotape her walking and standing today. He also brought his external hard drive in so I could get all the pics of her surgery off (we both are Mac users) for Molly.

Molly’s Physical Therapist, Kristen came in today with her assistant(?) and she started to teach Molly how to sit up and to get out of bed.

Then they got her standing and Molly looked amazing although she didn’t feel that way.

She walked a few steps to the curtain and back to her bed. Her PT (the woman in green scrubs) was almost 5′ 9″ and Molly looked just a few inches shy of that! We can’t wait to see if she grew 2″ but she’ll have to be able to walk to where they measure a bit down the hall.

(I know this pic is blurry but it is the only one I had of her at this moment!)

And here she is on her 2nd walk this afternoon. She made it to her door and back to her bed!

After her 1st walk, she opened her gifts from her brothers. She wanted to wait and reward herself something after she walked!

Molly was weaned off her Diladaud which she was self-administering through the PCA pump.

This is what she pushed to get her meds.

And this is the machine that administered her medicine.

They began weaning her off of that around 10:30 am today. She wasn’t happy about that and kept asking for the button to push. Now, she is taking meds orally along with some in her iv. She is being given Valium to help keep the muscle spasms at bay (and so far it has worked!) and some other pain drug and motrin. She was in a ton of pain at about 2:30pm which was too soon for more meds so they added phenergan which did the trick. But the Valium and phenergan make her very sleepy so that is what she has been doing all day.

She also has a fever now. It has gone down since this afternoon. It was 101.2 but is down to 100.?. The fever is because of the anesthesia and the meds and what is going on in her chest. Part of her rehab is to blow into this thing 10x and hour to help get her lungs strong and get this gunk out of her chest. Then the fever will go away. She is just starting to cough but it hurts her a lot.

She is nauseous on and off due to the meds, but has managed to handle it well. She isn’t eating much at all. She had a couple bites of an english muffin this am and lunch was 2 tiny bites of a baked custard. She did eat 1/2 a graham cracker, so that is good. Dinner is here and she is out. Basically, she has me give her sips of ginger ale or water all day.

Molly’s Occupational Therapist showed up today too. They left her with

a reacher,

a long bath brush and instructions about what she can’t do for a while. For example, she can’t twist her trunk for about 6 weeks. She can’t bend over. She has to learn to put her shoes and socks on while she is sitting with her legs crossed. (Kind of like what we ladies have to do when we are pregnant.) But the reacher thing will be very handy for her and it even has a magnet on the bottom of it so if she drops a pin or earring or something, it will zip it up for her. We are just going to have to make sure she doesn’t use it to pinch her brothers or vice versa!

Dr. Hey just came in to see her tonight at about 5pm. He asked if I had taken some photos of Molly standing and walking today. He wants me to send them to him so he can include them in a lecture he is giving tomorrow. Pretty cool.

She still has her catheter and ivs (one in each arm) but only one is working. She had a central line iv in her neck too during surgery but that is out too.

Ron took the boys to Frankie’s Fun Park today. It’s kind of like a Craig’s Cruisers. And I just spoke with him and they were driving around the campus of Duke University in Durham at the time. He said it is a beautiful old campus with a wall surrounding it all and that there is only one entrance into the campus. It is pouring rain here now, the first time we have seen rain during our vacation during the day. (We had that rainy ghost walk a couple days ago). I had no idea it was raining because we were keeping the room darkened for Molly and I just opened the blinds and was shocked. It is weird living in a hospital room all day. You lose all sense of time and all.

If you haven’t checked out Dr. Hey’s blog yet, I encourage you to. It is kind of neat to see her highlighted on there.

These are amazing before and after shots of her that Dr. Hey gave us!

Thank you all for all your prayers and comments. Molly is truly enjoying them. When she wakes up, I read them to her and she is shocked almost every time about all the caring friends and families out there. It is really helping her to hear them!! Soon, I anticipate she will wanting to use the laptop herself again, and to read them again herself.

We love you all,

Lysanne and Ron

Oops!

11:42pm

I fixed the link below now…. try it again. Sorry about that!

How Cool is this????

11: 35 pm.
Dr. Hey just emailed me with a link to his blog! Molly is on it and he has all the photos and the details! I am just tickled and teared up over here looking at the amazing before and after photos of her!! Check it out…. Click here for Molly’s entry on his blog!

She is resting now….

8:45pm

Wow! She is resting in her room now. I got to go back and see her in the PACU for about 2 minutes at about 4:30pm. She wasn’t able to come up out of Recovery as soon as they thought because she was having low urine output and a fast heartrate. When I put my hand on hers, she opened her eyes and smiled. The first thing she said to me was “Will you give me a kiss?”. THe 2nd thing she asked was “were her eyes swollen?” because she couldn’t open them very well. And yes, they were. She is swollen from being on her tummy for those 5+ hours of prep and surgery. The 3rd thing she said was “Look, I can wiggle my toes!” She was worried about becoming paralyzed. All the while, inbetween these statements she would fall right back to sleep. I left shortly after for the waiting room and we went up to her room to wait for her.

We only had to wait about 20 seconds before she was being wheeled into the room at about 4:40 pm. She gave the boys a cheesy grin that she had promised to give them.

She is in a lot of pain but is managing it herself with her PCA pain control unit. She managed to tell us a few things that she remembered like the last thing she remembers is the mask going over her face. She looks taller to us already even though she is only lying down. She just looks different!!

Dr. Hey came in with Evangeline and spoke with Molly and us again. He showed a groggy Molly pictures of her new and improved posture, a lying down pic of her they had taken. She smiled. He also showed her her new xrays and her response was “Are you sure that is me?”

She is drinking sips of water and she tried to eat some of her liquid dinner which consisted of jello cubes, bland chicken broth, grape juice, a popsicle, and ice tea, which upon tasting her only word was “YUCK!”. She did eat a few jello cubes and a couple bites of popsicle but that is all she could handle.

Molly had a very nice nurse named Mila, and she even brought in 2 extra dinner trays for us…not the liquid kind but a low sodium kind but hey, they weren’t bad.

The boys and Ron left awhile ago, to go swimming at the hotel and just came back to visit. I might switch out with Ron then for an hour to go swimming myself with the boys too and then come back for the night.

Molly told us there was another 12 year old girl in the recovery room next to her. She couldn’t see her but could hear her crying in pain. Molly had figured out the girl had done some dislocation of her ankle and must have just had surgery. Molly said they opened the curtain between them for a brief moment and they both looked at each other and Molly said she gave the girl a smile and the girl smiled back at her. How cute is that? She is in all this pain and uncomfortableness (is that a word?) and yet she still has energy to smile at another girl to try and make her feel better!

Our brave Molly is resting now and periodically pushing her PCA, as I can hear it beep out loud. If any of you would like her room number or phone number for later this week, just email me and I will get that to you. She has a new night nurse named Mary Ellen and she is in from Michigan too. We have met more than 6 people today working here who are from Michigan!

Here are her xrays from the doc’s files. We’ll have better ones tomorrow to show. But here is a side before:

and here is the after pic:

and her back from the back after:

We will continue to update you all as she progresses. Oh, and I guess the Physical Therapist isn’t coming until tomorrow. So, she gets a break tonight.

…Lys