Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Gallbladder Surgery

My DH left at 4:30 this AM to drive down to Illinois to see Annie before she has gallbladder surgery. This came up rather unexpectedly and he was able to clear his calendar more easily than I was. So he got the short straw.

Annie seems to be okay with it all, telling me about what the nurse described as her surgical procedure, etc. But we know Annie, she will fight the doctors and the nurses, inflicting self harm if the pain is at all intense. So DH went down to do what little he can to help. See Annie is 19 and considered an adult, we have been trying to get guardianship of her because with the FASD and the Acquired Brain Injury, and all the other alphabet soup after her name, she does not make safe choices for herself. But we have been hampered by the fact that the disability courts look at her IQ which somehow tests out at 89. That seems to mean that she is not disabled enough so we are having to gather all sorts of documentation from all sorts of professionals to make our case. In the meantime she is considered a functional adult. (yikes)

Just to give you an example of our concern. Annie is highly allergic to fish, we have known this since she was allergy tested at age 3. Well at 16 Annie decided that she was not allergic to fish, that the doctors were wrong and she knew better. So she had some fish at her friends' house. She started feeling ill almost immediately and came home where she promptly started to vomit multiple times. She was so agitated though that she was walking all over the house and must have projectile vomited in about 6 different rooms, all the time screaming at me, "my head hurts, I don't feel well" I of course did not know that she had eaten fish, so didn't know what was wrong. Then her face started to swell and her eyes started to swell shut, so I knew it was an allergic reaction and got her Epipen into her and called 911. She then started screaming at me, cursing me out the whole time, "I ate some fish, you stupid b***, I hate you".

She was wildly out of control, and despite our best efforts to calm her and put cooling cloths on her swollen eyes, she was rampaging. She gouged at her eyes, trying to make them stop hurting/itching, leaving huge open wounds on her face and eyelids. She began banging her head on the wall and door frame, hard. We called off the ambulance run as the Epipen had done its job, but I almost considered an ambulance run to the psych hospital.

Eventually the benadryl and the exertion slowed her down and she was able to settle for the night. But the wounds on her face and eyes were horrible, luckily they didn't get infected.

Now can you see my concerns for surgery. In a worst case scenario I envision her trying to rip out her stitches, IV, etc as she comes out of the anesthesia. I certainly hope that she won't but we don't have such a good track record to go on. So I will be thinking about my DH and Annie all day hoping for the best.

No comments: