Monday August 11

Hello Everyone and greetings from Riley Hospital.

It has been a busy weekend, and I'm sorry I didn't update the site sooner.

The surgery has been put off for now. We will find out later today if it will be going on tomorrow. The final decision is up to the surgeon, Dr. Rodefeld, and he should be here sometime this afternoon.

Lily's white blood count was elevated for a couple of days, and the doctors weren't sure if she had an infection or if it was up because of the medication or stress. Her blood and urine cultures came back negative so it looks like it was because of the meds. Her is a picture of all the equipment that Lily has hooked up to her.

I'm sure you can see why she might be a little stressed out! The machine in front is the ventilator. She has had a little trouble keeping her oxygen levels up, so they have to manually "bag" her occasionally. Again, this is a side effect of the medicines (prostaglandins) that are keeping her PDA open. They are lowering the level of prostaglandins and this should help Lily keep her O2 saturations up. As soon as they start the surgery, they will disconnect the PDA and stop the prostaglandins. This will help Lily breathe better.

We got a room at the Ronald McDonald House. It is very nice. We have a queen size and a twin bed in the room. There are mats available if anyone else wants to stay the night. They provide towels and toiletries, and there is a stocked kitchen. So, we have a place to stay and food to eat. They have extra space to store things if we bring in our own food. I can't say enough good things about the people at the house. They are wonderful, full of compassion and so helpful. We are so lucky to have a place like the Ronald McDonald House (RMH). If you want to help, please start to save your pop tabs. Last year, the house here raised $400,000 to help pay for costs just from pop tabs. If you collect them, give them to me and I'll make sure they get to the RMH. There are 47 rooms and some apartments at the house and they are full all the time. They help a lot of people and can use all the help they can get. They are staffed with mostly volunteers and each guest helps too by cleaning their own rooms and doing their own laundry. I will do my best to get some pictures of the beautiful facility and post it.

Ryan, Angie, Xander, Gail, and Chuck came down yesterday and took us out to Eagle Glen park for a cookout. The park is beautiful and the food was DELISH! Thank you to all of them for providing a good meal and good company. We saw several deer in the park.
Here is a picture of four of them: ----------->
The deer were so tame that they didn't run away from the cars when we drove by. There is also a nice lake with a marina. They have live music several nights a week. Very nice. Indy has lots of parks and people were out riding bikes, walking and rollerblading.


Here are a couple more pics of Lily.





Lily looks a little puffy in these pictures. Her swelling has gone down a bit, and she isn't as puffy now.

I will update the site when we find out more.

Love to all,
Barb