Poor Eva

Poor Eva. She's still the sweetest thing ever. She woke up feeling pretty good and went down for her CT scan. SHe says "this is the thing that hurt the leastest." Then she had some visitors and then her head really started to hurt and she started to look horrible. I started to get very mad and scared that her brain was swelling or something and started yelling that I was going to pick her up and carry her down and chase the Neuro guy in the ICU until he told me what was going on (this was noon, the scan was at 8am.) So, he finally came up and in his wonderful "I don't have any social skills so I became a neurosurgeon" method, he told us what was going on.

No brain swelling, everything inside looks fine. There are not fragments of bone that have perforated the brain lining or anything. So, I'm asking him if she should where a helmet and he then starts telling me that the biggest risk is for meningitis. Since she had a laceration into the skull and blood, that is the biggest risk. He's talking that she needs to be on antibiotics..... OK, I'm figuring oral. Then I ask if she should go to school. He say "not until you see me." He's still not explaining any of this... when I'll see him, why we need to be so careful, what we are trying to avoid...... finally he yells at me "this little girl fell hard enough to crack her skull and she has a brain injury. This is a very serious condition." Well thank you ass hole, you could've told me that in the first place. If you tell me I need to drink poison to make my little girl better, I'll do it. But, I'm not a mind reader.

So, she needs to stay home and be closely watched for fever and seizures and signs of infection until we see him (yeah right!!!! Until we see a DIFFERENT neurosurgeon). She really shouldn't be walking anywhere alone in case she would have a seizure and fall until she's more healed. And the great thing, he's yelling all of this in his loud, Boston accent IN FRONT OF Eva. So, all she hears is "no school for two weeks" and starts crying as soon as he leaves. The saddest part is that she has to have a pic line placed and we have to give her IV anti-biotics for that time. So, we tell her about that and they come in to do it and the nurse anesthetist comes in and I say "Oh, it's this kind of sedation? She just ate 1.5 hours ago." The whole thing is cancelled, poor Eva cried for an hour about it.

So, Eva is just so sad. It's so unfair. She has this whole body to fall on and she falls on her head. She could've broken her leg and this would all be less scary. However, I know it could've been worse. Those are the wonderful images that will haunt me. The real, scary image of seeing her fall just morphs into the stuff we've seen on movies when you close your eyes. Grey's Anatomy has made this entire experience much worse. Eva's really not talking much, she's just so sad. She turned down chocolate for the first time ever and I then proceded to ask her 100 questions to make sure her head injury wasn't get worse. She's just so sad. My brother Nolan went through this last year with an infection after an ACL repair. It was horrible to watch him go through it, but watching a 5 year old is even worse.