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