Turn For The Worse

After doing well after her surgery on Wednesday Savannah began having problems on Sat morning. She started having little seizure clusters- she had 11 2 min apart that morning- despite being on the Keppra for seizures 3 times a day. Around 1 pm Sat she began to run a 102 fever so they started testing blood and urine and nasal secretions. She had a yeast infection in her urinary tract again and pneumonia again - except this time a contagious sort. They tried to hold off on the tylenol due to her liver not functioning which from early tests on the liver biopsy show that it was an existing problem.They gave her ativan to stop the seizures on early sat and midday sat- neither dose helped keep them away completely. She has pretty much sleeping all weekend and today. We do not know if it from the infection, the seizure meds, or something else like problems with the brain.

All her vital signs were doing pretty well other than the heart rate being up from the fever and infection. Although her resp rate was ok her breathing pattern was not normal. And she had been totally out of it all weekend and still having the seizures so the neuro wanted to put her in ICU. They plan on doing a MRI and knew she would need to be sedated for that but were leery because of her breathing pattern. They also said we had 3 choices. Keep giving the seizure meds that knock her out and she may stop breathing. Do not give them to her and she would keep seizing. The 3rd option was to put a breathing tube in which would enable them to keep giving her the meds. So we did the breathing tube.

We already knew her liver was not functioning well and this past week her kidneys had problems probably due to one antibiotic that she was on for a while. Then of course her brain is having issues due to the seizures. We are hoping that once the pneumonia gets cleared some that she will improve her breathing and stuff. They have her sedated at least for a couple of days so she can do the MRI and rest while the breathing tube is in. Then they will try to let her wake up and see how responsive she is and how her breathing pattern is. The neuro doctor talked to me last night about the possibility of death. He did not give a time frame so I am unsure whether he was just preparing me for the road ahead with the evident mito problem or real soon. He just said what we pretty much already knew. The mito problems causes problems with a lot of the main organs and since her liver, kidney, stomach, and brain were sick right now it could lead to that. One thing is her stomach is tolerating the tube feeds still and pushing everything out as it should. We are thankful for that. The brain issue is that the one side where the seizures have been looks better but still not perfect and the other side the waves are slow. He did not say that she was brain dead or on the way to that - just that it was slow. He said when the organs do this with mito death usually followed but still no specifics. He said we will see what the MRI showed and what happens. Please keep her and us in your prayers. Thank you very much.