Surgery...Again :-(

Hey Everyone,

It's Erin again (Amy says she's "too crabby to type"). Got some not so good news. Amy's incision is pretty infected, so they admitted her to the hospital again this afternoon and are going to do surgery tomorrow to debride the infected area under her incision. Basically, that means they're going to open her up along the same incision, clean out everything, remove the mesh "plate" covering the hole in her skull, irrigate it (wash it out), and sew her back up. Her attending surgeon says that the mesh plate is more cosmetic than anything, and that she can have surgery again in the future to put a mesh plate in if she wants it. They didn't say the plate was the cause of the infection, but they want to remove any foreign materials to help ease the healing process.

Basically what happened: on Saturday morning, Amy woke up with a little yellowish drainage around her incision site. It wasn't pus per se, but wasn't normal. Throughout the day, her temperature became elevated to 99.8 (not a fever technically, but higher than normal). Finally at 8 PM we went to the ER because she was showing some beginning signs of infection. She had a CT scan done and met with one of her neuro residents, and they decided that she was sort of on the edge of infection but not clinically infected at that point. Her labs were a little on the abnormal side but not enough to indicate infection. They sent her home with oral antibiotics and more pain meds. Then Sunday evening, Amy's temp jumped to a fever, but she didn't want to go to the ER because she didn't want to pay her copay just to be sent home again. We decided to wait till this morning (Monday). When we went in, Amy's temp was over 102 and her pulse was really high. Her entire neuro team that did her surgery initially ended up coming in to see her in the ER and decided another procedure was the best way to go.

We don't know the time of Amy's procedure yet but we'll let you know one way or another.

That's all for now.