Back at the Hospital

It didn’t take very long before we realized that we weren’t going to make it to clinic the next week.  And since it was the weekend and since we were tired of being in emergent situations, we decided to go ahead and make an appointment with the neurosurgery department so that someone could check Nathan over.

When we got there, they took a bunch of X-rays, but couldn’t see anything wrong.  So the most likely scenario was that the shunt was blocked…again.  So Nathan was readmitted to the hospital for the 5^th time.

Since Dr. Riva-Cambrin was out of town, Dr. Marion Walker was the one who would be operating on Nathan.  Dr. Walker is somewhat of a legend at Primary Children’s, having been there for over 25 years and having performed thousands upon thousands of neurosurgical procedures.  Really, there is no one you’d want operating on your child more than Dr. Walker. 

The surgery was surprisingly quicker than we had expected.  Dr. Walker re-emerged from the OR after what couldn’t have been more than a half an hour.  He told us that Nathan’s tummy was just full of fluid and that that was the reason for the blockage.  So he had inserted an EVD to drain the fluid while we figured out what to do about the shunt.

Since we had already dealt with an EVD once, we weren’t really excited about doing it again.  But when we finally got to see Nathan again after surgery, we discovered one of the reasons why Dr. Walker is a legend.

Instead of inserting the EVD into Nathan’s head, he put it directly into Nathan’s stomach.  I thought it was just pure genius.  He limited the amount of surgery that Nathan would have to go through at that time, but produced the same results.  We were very, very impressed to say the least.

But now we back to the same old question: what are we going to do with this shunt?  And unfortunately, all of the good answers were already taken.