WC Day 3: Infection and 50,000

Phew....just going to get this in under the wire!!

It’s been a long, dreary, cold day.  Where did spring go? Oh yeah, that’s right, we will hit 80 this weekend. Gotta love Texas weather.

Madison has another abscess around her g-tube tract…her third since September. Not good…not good at all. We spent hours with the pediatrician yesterday. That visit resulted in an urgent call to our GI by our ped, in part because not only was there an ugly abscess, but our girl wasn’t looking good in general. Our ped is not an alarmist and has a lot of medically complex kids, so when she gets concerned, well, I do too.

By this morning I was being asked to bring Madi to Cooks for an ultrasound and possible surgery to drain the abscess, and had started working in that direction before waking her.  When I did, thankfully, the abscess was…..how do I say this delicately….it was taking care of itself, if you will. With that, another call was made, knowing the ultrasound would be less than revealing, and we were not going to need “help” with draining the abscess after all.  Madi LOOKED better too, so I was feeling a little less concerned than I had been.

A little.

Problem is…she has already been on antibiotics for 6 days and while on them, the abscess continued to grow. We got to where we were yesterday while ON the antibiotics. All possible indications that maybe the antibiotic chosen wasn’t the best one for the infection…..or worse, that perhaps she is becoming resistant to this particular one (our options are already limited because of the mitochondrial disease)…..or (not sure if this is worse or not) there is a chance that the abscess is walled off enough that the oral antibiotics are having a hard time getting to the infection. Regardless of all that, she is due to be done with this course of antibiotics tomorrow and we have obviously not cleared the infection yet. Yes, it’s good that the abscess is draining on its own, but it’s not “all better” quite yet, and I am not sure stopping the antibiotics now is the best thing.

With all of that, we went over today and had a culture of the area done. While not ideal to do while on antibiotics, it might give us some useful information.  It’s probably staph….the kids are all colonized…..but maybe not. We might be able to see if it’s responsive to what she is on, or if there is something more effective.

Tomorrow we will head back over again to see our GI and talk things over. At this point I suspect we need to continue antibiotics for at least a few more days,  but we also need to try and determine why this keeps happening and how we might avoid it in the future. Clearly the infections take a toll on her, so avoiding ones that we can kind of see are going to happen again, well, those need some special attention. Praying for some wisdom for all involved!!

In other news……we officially hit 50,000 hits sometime today!! Thanks to all for reading and hanging in there with me!!