Thursday July 15th, 2010 PM

This afternoon has been one of good news and bad news. I will give you the bad news first which is not all that bad. Alyson does have a UTI still, and that has caused her to feel like she has to go to the bathroom every few minutes. And then she began to get a bit of a fever this after noon. So because of the fever, they put the catheter back in so she did not have to get up so much. That is the bad news. As I write this tonight, she does feel better, and the fever is coming back down.

The good news is that Dr Mocco has been in to see Alyson and us. He looked her over, and talked to her for a while. Then he took the Manny Pauline and I out to the hallway to talk to us and to show us pictures of Alyees brain. This would be a good time to say we saw nothing, but we did see something, and that was blood. Dr Mocco went into detail on how the brain is built in our heads, the layers that surround it and how fluids surround and protect the brain. The blood we saw was down in the middle of her brain, and not in the outer layers like I was expecting. He said that it was alot of blood, but he has seen cases with more.

The fluid around the brain is created and then absorbed into the body completely 3 times a day. At any given moment, there is 150 ml of fluid around the brain, the body creates 450 ml of this fluid every day. It is clear and normally is like clean water. The blood leaked into this fluid. The fluid drains down thru the spinal cord, and is absorbed into the body that way. With the blood in it, it does not get abosorbed properly, so it does not get absorbed as fast as normal, but the brain does not know enough to stop producing the stuff. This is why they have put the tube in her head. It is draining off the fluid so that it does not build up in her skull, and causing her brain to colapse.

The hole in her skull is about 1/4 inch in diameter, and the tube actually goes through her brain directly to the center of her head.

Dr Mocco said that after all the cat scans MRIs and the Angiogram, they really have not determined where the blood came from. She is still in a critical status, and is still being monitored every hour. The time frame for being in this crital status is up to 14 days.

Dr Mocco believes that this is what he would call a sub arachnoid hemorrage. There is no cause for it, no way to predict it, and can just happen to anyone, although rare. It is not a stoke, as a stoke is a hemorage of an artery heading to the brain, and part of the brain begins to die because of that. This is not what happened to Alyee.

The fluid draining from her head this afternoon is much clearer than it has been. This is a good sign. Dr Mocco said that the pain in her head and neck is normal. He said that the pain in her neck will travel down the spinal cord in the next few days making her back sore as well. This all has to do with the problem the body is having absorbing the contaminated spinal fluid.

They will still do the Angiogram on Monday, as that is standard on all these cases, but he does not expect to see an anurism with that second test. He expects that she will make a full and complete recovery, with no side effects, limitations or restrictions. And he said that the odds of this ever happening again are very low and there was no reason to ever worry about it. So that is what we are calling the good news of the day. We were all relieved to hear all of this. He said she should be 90% better in about 2 more weeks, but it could take 2 months to fully recover and be back to normal.

We feel much better now, knowing that although she is still in a fragile condition, tired from all the poking and proding, and slowly recovering from a very tramatic brain injury, that she is well on her way to recovery.

We are thankful for all your thoughts and prayers.

Tomorrows goal is to get her up, and give her a bath.