AM:
Emmy had a much better night last night. Her pain was mostly controlled and she slept for a few hours. We’ve entered the nausea phase and she vomited at 4am and has felt pretty nauseous all morning despite having Zofran.
Today, the team is adding Emend to her meds, a medication used to prevent nausea and vomiting after chemotherapy or surgery. They are hoping this will help Emmy stay comfortable for a longer period than Zofran.
We saw great results from the Lasix yesterday and will do another round today to continue to reduce her fluid load. Later today (hopefully well after the Lasix), her foley catheter will be removed which will help her to increase her mobility as we work toward walking. They will also DC the CVP today, so with any luck we will be another tube and another line down by tonight.
Her hemoglobin is a bit low this morning (7.1 down from 7.8 ). Typically they will start blood transfusions below 7, so they will watch this closely today and tomorrow and determine a plan of action. The team does not believe that she is clinically bleeding, but if this continues to trend down they will need to take some action.
Emmy has continued to do great with her finger pokes and her sugars have been very well controlled. As of this morning she is still requiring a very low oxygen dose (0.5 L/min) through her nasal cannula but we will continue to try to remove this today.
Now for the best news of this morning’s brief; Emmy will progress to a clear liquid diet today. They will also start a low dose of feeds in her J tube. Even though she was in some pain at the time, her smile broke through when she heard a popsicle was in her future today.
PM : Today was another good day. She is looking more and more like our Emmy girl again – you can see the sparkle coming back to her beautiful brown eyes. Her favorite thing at the moment is to play the game of “guess your blood sugar” when they check her sugar each hour. So far, she’s guessed it right on the dot twice!!
Today she walked a couple steps to the chair then sat in the chair for 2ish hrs!! She looked so awesome. As you can imagine, that took lots of energy and the rest of the day was mostly spent sleeping. She asked to poke her own finger for her sugar which is awesome. She got her first popsicle again although couldn’t eat much of it as it caused her nausea to kick in but it was a good first step. They added another nausea med tonight to try and help. They started her tube feeds at a very low rate (10ml/hr) for the next 24hrs to make sure her intestines can handle it. If there’s no issues, then they will slowly start to increase it tomorrow. They also removed her foley today. Another tube gone!! This means there is going to be a lot more movement as she will be getting in and out of bed every few hours with all the fluids she’s getting. Vitals are looking great. She has asked us to take pictures of her belly to show her every time we give her a bath. Her scar is looking really good. I hope she wears this scar with pride and that it acts as a physical reminder of her strength and grit when life gets tough both now and in the future. 
***FYI: although these updates are for you all to keep up to date and follow along, they are also for Emmy so she can look back and see how incredible she is. I’m going to post pics of her belly – scroll on past if you don’t like things like that!! The purple is the glue they use on the scar to help it close. That will eventually peel off and it will be a red scar like normal.
