It's Thursday morning as I write this, because I was too tired to post last night. Wednesday turned out to be a day of two halves. After Theo's diaper blowout in the morning, I felt like I was walking on air. I thought that he had turned the corner, and would soon be making progress towards discharge. Then, around 6 pm, madness kicked in. Happy tears were replaced by sad tears.
At 6 pm, Theo went from being stable to suddenly having a very high heart rate and very low blood pressure. His hemoglobin also dropped significantly. All of these are signs of blood loss, and the team became concerned about internal bleeding resulting from a kidney biopsy that they did earlier in the day. For the next four hours, the doctors and nurses worked non-stop to try to stabilize his blood pressure and heart rate by pushing a combination of fluid and blood.
After four hours of watching, waiting, and hoping, Theo was back on his way to the OR. Seriously. For another oben-abdomen procedure. (Now, I know I said there would be bumps along the road. However, there have been more bumps and bigger bumps than I was thinking.) Nick and I were very hesitant to send him back again, and even stopped the process at one point to have the surgeon come out and talk with us again. Ultimately, everyone decided that surgery was the best course of action to make sure he wasn't bleeding and to clean out any fresh blood.
In the OR, Theo's abdomen was opened again via the same incision as transplant. The surgeon found a pool of fresh blood, but did not see any more active bleeding. He cleaned and washed Theo's abdomen out again, and sowed him back up. It was the right call to take him back to the OR in order to clean out the blood pool.
We're back in the PICU now. Theo is being watched closely, as you can imagine. His temperature is up a bit again today, and his blood pressure is a bit low. We're hoping to see some improvement today.
We did get some good news this morning: the kidney biopsy from yesterday showed that there is no kidney rejection. There is prograf toxicity, which means that the dose of immunosuppression he was getting was too high. Everyone is relieved that rejection is off the table. Especially Whitney. :) She took good care of Dubya for Theo.
Theo has a great team of doctors and nurses. They care deeply for him, and for us. The nephrologist who has been rounding this week shared with us this morning that, although they don't always show it, the nephrology team cares so deeply for their patients, and this has been a tough week for them. He knows that it has been a difficult hospital stay for all of us. He is not typically emotional, so it was touching to hear from him how much they all care about Theo. We know Theo is in good hands here.
I am believing that Theo is going to get better. Thank you for believing and praying along with us.
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