Saturday, September 12, 2009
Grandma Duty (Belated Report)
As the late great Gilda Radner used to say when channeling Roseanne Roseannadana, it's always something.
My coping mechanism seems to involve rapid vacillation between the extremes of trying to do too much and flaking out entirely. Hence my long absence with only a few cryptic messages.
Here's the short version. In August, one of my twin grand-girlies, Marisa, banged her head in a playground mishap. They took her in for an x-ray and found no damage from the fall, BUT discovered that she had a fairly serious case of Arnold-Chiari Syndrome, where parts of her brain were growing down into her spinal column, blocking the normal flow of spinal fluid and creating cysts that would eventually cause paralysis.
Once they had a surgery date set, plans were put in motion for me to come up and act as medical translator and general helper-outer. I'm not going to pretend that I was just too busy making preparations to be gone for up to two weeks to post anything. My radio silence was partly because I didn't know how to relate all this without making it sound like it was all about me, and partly because I was just quietly freaking out. Also there have been some really good TV shows on....
But seriously. I came up last Tuesday to be present at the pre-op assessment. After a LONG day of waiting (the surgery just before hers went into overtime), Marisa had her giant brain squished back into place Wednesday. She was in the PICU at Childrens' Hospital (NICE facility, btw) about 18 hours, then got moved to her own room. Her recovery is going along like gangbusters and she may get to come home as soon as tomorrow!
Back to it being all about me -- I tried to set-up my horrible HP laptop (recovered from its FIFTH major crash!) with all my backlogged email and the sites I try to keep up with. But I really haven't been keeping up or catching up all that well yet. So if I missed something really really important you think I should know about, let me know, and I will try to report in more regularly as well.
Marisa and friend at Childrens' Hospital Gift Shop
My coping mechanism seems to involve rapid vacillation between the extremes of trying to do too much and flaking out entirely. Hence my long absence with only a few cryptic messages.
Here's the short version. In August, one of my twin grand-girlies, Marisa, banged her head in a playground mishap. They took her in for an x-ray and found no damage from the fall, BUT discovered that she had a fairly serious case of Arnold-Chiari Syndrome, where parts of her brain were growing down into her spinal column, blocking the normal flow of spinal fluid and creating cysts that would eventually cause paralysis.
Once they had a surgery date set, plans were put in motion for me to come up and act as medical translator and general helper-outer. I'm not going to pretend that I was just too busy making preparations to be gone for up to two weeks to post anything. My radio silence was partly because I didn't know how to relate all this without making it sound like it was all about me, and partly because I was just quietly freaking out. Also there have been some really good TV shows on....
But seriously. I came up last Tuesday to be present at the pre-op assessment. After a LONG day of waiting (the surgery just before hers went into overtime), Marisa had her giant brain squished back into place Wednesday. She was in the PICU at Childrens' Hospital (NICE facility, btw) about 18 hours, then got moved to her own room. Her recovery is going along like gangbusters and she may get to come home as soon as tomorrow!
Back to it being all about me -- I tried to set-up my horrible HP laptop (recovered from its FIFTH major crash!) with all my backlogged email and the sites I try to keep up with. But I really haven't been keeping up or catching up all that well yet. So if I missed something really really important you think I should know about, let me know, and I will try to report in more regularly as well.
Marisa and friend at Childrens' Hospital Gift Shop
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