Hospital Life...Day 31

Today is Day 31.  In you missed yesterday's post, you can read that HERE.

This morning began with some intense breakthrough pain around 7:00.  The resident was paged and he came by.  She was in between times for getting her Morphine and she was given Ativan.  He decided to see if the Ativan would help to settle her.  It seemed to help eventually.  

At 10:00, Peyton was brought back down to Nuclear Medicine for more scans like the ones she had yesterday.  It's possible with the gallium to see changes in concentration of the radioactive tracers at certain time intervals {i.e. 24, 48, 72 hours, etc.}.  Her scans yesterday were at 48 hours.  Just like yesterday, today's scans involved transferring Peyton from her bed onto the table pictured below for the scan.  If you look closely, you can see Peyton strapped in there.

The doctors wanted some different angles, so it took a bit longer than yesterday's scans.  It took even longer when, at 4 minutes remaining, the machine stopped working at a portion {if not all} had to be repeated.  Remember the earlier pain and agitation Peyton had been having?  That never really settled out 100%.  Transferring her to the table kicked her pain up a few notches.  Even with the Ativan and additional doses of Morphine, she really didn't settle.  She wasn't crying, but she wasn't totally settled.  She did as well as could be expected though.  She did have one period of breakthrough pain during the scan like she'd had earlier in the morning.  

I couldn't tell you what the below image shows by any means, but it's interesting to see:

Once the scan was complete, Peyton was transferred back onto her bed.  Once again, her pain kicked up several notches because of the transfer.  It's so hard for her to settle out when she is moved like this.  It breaks my heart.

From here, Peyton was brought down the hall to have a CT of her leg.  Care to guess what is involved??  If you guessed another couple transfers {on and off of the table for the CT}, you'd be right.  More pain.  More agitation.  It went as well as you could hope and then she had to be transferred back to her bed to come back upstairs.  One of the radiology people commented when Peyton was put down in her bed that at least she smiled for him.  I'm thinking, wait...what???  You think that gigantic grimace on her face is a smile??  Perhaps when it was followed by a scream, that cleared it up for him.  I haven't seen a smile from her in probably a week despite my best efforts, so I'm pretty sure she wasn't going to smile in that situation.

All of that took about 3 hours.  We got back up to Peyton's room around 1:00pm.

I don't know what the final word is on the scans from today, but what I do know right now is that nothing that was done today shed any additional light on the situation.  We're just as unsure right now about her leg as we were before going down.  I had really hoped that all the trauma of transporting her and transferring her four times today {plus everything from yesterday} would result in some answers. I am told that they may want to do more imaging tomorrow.  As I said earlier, they will sometimes do gallium scans at various intervals.  Tomorrow would be another interval.  The question is - is it going to be worth putting Peyton through the necessary transport and transfers in order to do this??  I don't know that she will have more scans tomorrow.  I don't even know if what I heard earlier was the final word on today's scans.  But this is what I know as I write this right now.

That picture was taken last night.  She's been too agitated and unhappy today.  Not that she looks happy in this one.  And if you are from Houston, yes that is the giraffe that is the mascot from Memorial Hermann Children's Hospital.  She got that giraffe when she was 2 weeks old when she had her 2nd surgery there back in May 2006.