Hello friends!  There isn’t too much to update today as Annabelle is about the same as yesterday.  Her ammonia has remained steady in the 80’s and 90’s but her lactate continues to climb slowly.   The team thinks the rising lactate is just a result of her metabolic disorder, and they aren’t leaning towards infection since all of her cultures have come back negative so far.  Their plan for today was to introduce a little bit of formula into her system (like 10ml/hour little) to see how she tolerated it and to make sure she didn’t throw up.  That would have been great except that it took the formula lab 5 hours to finally get the formal to us (it was just straight Enfamil so I don’t know what the hold up was….argg).  She finally started feeds around 4:30pm and hopefully they will increase the rate tomorrow if she seems to hold all of that down.  Mike and I really believe her lactate issues are really coming from the fact that she has no real nutrition getting into her system (as food in the stomach is better than IV nutrition).  

She’s been very fussy today, so we think she’s either starving or teething.  Hunger is supposed to increase post-transplant and the poor baby hasn’t had “real food” on her stomach in days so I’m sure she’s hungry. She also appears to be thirsty, so we are allowed to give her some water.  She quickly chugged two medicine cups full of water but she threw it up, so now we’re giving her water on a green sponge and she really loves that. Physical therapy also came by to work with her (as they will do daily), and she was able to sit up for four minutes and they were also able to roll her to her sides.  Mike was also able to hold her for a few minutes before she got too fussy (it’s tough when she has all these IV tubes attached to the central line coming out of her neck and two drains coming out of her abdomen). 

We’re hoping for a better day tomorrow as today has been a little frustrating and draining (the PICU is starting to get old now and we’re looking forward to a little more privacy and quiet on the recovery floor). 

Prayer Requests:

1.) Continue to pray for the donor’s family.

2.) PLEASE PLEASE pray that God would place exceptional nurses over Annabelle’s care.

3.) Pray that Annabelle’s ammonia levels would decline and that her lactate levels would decline and not continue to rise.

4.) Pray for no rejection (liver is still looking great!).

5.) Pray for no clotting (she’s off the heavy duty blood thinner and now on two injections/day of a safer blood thinner).

6.) Pray for no infections (pray the remaining cultures come back negative).

7.) Pray that Annabelle would tolerate her formula through her g-tube and that they could increase her rate.

8.) Pray that Annabelle can get moved to 7B recovery floor soon!