Olivia's Recovery

So lots of people have been asking how Olivia has been doing. She has been Ok and getting better. So far we have had some pretty weird things happen. For instance, when they took the catheter out of her (which was put straight through the front of her stomach) she started leaking blood and urine out of the hole in the front of her stomach instead of down and out of her bladder like most people when they wee. We had this last for about two days and went through every towel and bed sheet in the house. It finally stopped, but only after the doctor said "if it didn't stop another operation would have to be done"... Excuse me?

Saturday afternoon Olivia was discharged. My mom and sister and brother came to visit for one week (US Spring break) and flew down on Saturday morning. They got to see Olivia in the hospital and have been able to help me out at home in between sight-seeing. It is a bit difficult because their hotel is in the city so they have to take a taxi/ ferry or bus to get out to my house (since I can't drive them anywhere as I am home with Olivia). Stan had to go out of town this week for work so I haven't been able to join them like I had hoped. Instead I am by Olivia's bedside helping her walk to the bathroom, giving her meds, cleaning, and keeping the other kids out of Olivia's way (note: both Mary and Thomas have both managed to jump on her).

Night times have been rough, the first three days home Olivia woke up every 45 minutes to go to the bathroom, the second night was the same but we had an episode on the toilet from 11:00-1:00am. Finally, last night she slept in three hour increments (so its a real treat, which is funny b/c whenever I had a new born baby who would sleep for only 3 hours at a time I never thought I could make it).

Olivia has slowly progressed from only laying down to sitting up and now walking. She can't hold her urine so we have trails of blood/urine everywhere. Which is bad timing b/c the landlord just put in new carpet. We will probably get it cleaned after all this :-) Aside from difficulty holding her urine she is also in a lot of pain every time she wee's and will still have spasms in her bladder so I am very careful to make sure she gets her meds when they are due (we have about three bottles of stuff 2x's each all at different times throughout the day). With that said it should be noted that she is a lot better every day. She is making big improvements, so in a week or two I feel like she will be back to normal at the rate we are going, but still home from school because she is quite tender.

Amidst this recovery we have had some great things happen. Olivia's infant school (K-2) made her a box of cards (every kid from the whole school). You can imagine how long it took her to open all the pictures, she was delighted to see no one at school had forgotten who she was. A neighbor brought a cake over with lots of sprinkles and a mom from swimming brought over a dinner.

Here are some treats a family from church brought her

Olivia's Class (1W means Year 1 and W for mrs. Wong) each wrote on a circle and gave her a class gift....and a huge bucket full of cards.

Here is a card from Olivias kindy teacher! We seriously go to the best school!

here are some examples of the letters we got. We had over 100 which is about one or more from the whole school! Even the kindy and year two kids!

Mary has had a really hard time seeing Olivia get cards, stuffed animals, flowers and pictures. She got sent home from preschool on the one day this week I managed to organize a ride for her, because olivia is stuck in bed so I can't run any errands or even drop Mary off at school. Mary was sent home because she was "sick". When she came home she was fine, in fact she happily asked me where her "cards" were... I wanted to cry!!