Long night, bright and cheery morning....

Greetings All!

It's a bright and cheery sunday morning, and things are going exceedingly well.

Last night was a mostly sleepless night for Amelie, however, and she was a bit of a restless wee lass.  She lost several cords off her mass, which was a huge plus though.

Around midnight or so, she ripped out her auxiliary IV line out of her right hand.  Most of you probably don't know her overall loathing for bandaids, so we were very surprised at her tolerance of all the tape on her body.  Well, I think it wasn't tolerance, it was exhaustion and a lack of the ability to move to do anything about it.

Last night she ripped it out, and it took her less than a second.  Blood everywhere, but she wasn't phased.  We cleaned her up, and the docs said...who cares.  She's got the other one.  One tube down!

Then we noticed, while cleaning her up, that she had wet the bed and her foley catheter had leaked like mad.  We changed her, and then it happened again.  Another changing.  (the entire bed needs to be chucked in these situations).  Asked the doctor about the catheter, and BOOM...that's gone too.

The first picture for today is a shout out to the Kowalewski Family out in Portland, OR.  They both were in the architecture program at U-M, and we can clearly see the Architecture complex from our hospital window.

Next, a video of Amelie eating her first meal since the surgery.

She'd been on lockdown since before the surgery, and hadn't eaten anything at all since Thursday evening.  We asked her if she wanted to eat food and she responded with a hearty yes.  Actually what she says when she wants to say yes is "DOW", which has evolved from Da a few months ago.

So we ordered up a huge variety of food to see what she would want, and here's what she ate:

• Nutri-Grain Raspberry Cereal Bar
• 1/2 of a blueberry muffin
• 1/2 of a Dannon raspberry yogurt
• 1/2 cup of Oatmeal
• handful of Goldfish crackers
• Several buckets of water

That's a sizable meal for that little girl!

Most of you will notice the shaking as she brings the food to her mouth.  This is the legacy of the surgery, as the cerebellum was the location of the tumor.  The muscle memory of actions is built there, so she needs to retrain her brain to do those seamless things like moving food from a plate to her mouth.

From what we've been told over and over, its a good thing this was cerebellum, because it's a very resilient part of the brain that's good at re-routing processes.

I'll do the outlook for the next week as a separate post.