Skull Fracture

So it has been a while since our last entry, mainly because Henley has been doing so well over the last few months.  Apparently she was getting bored with that because we now find ourselves in the hospital with her yet again.

It started yesterday afternoon as we were walking around in Academy and Henley presumably walked into a pole and fell backwards, hitting the back of her head directly on the floor.  To any normal child this would be a bit concerning, but for Henley it is extra concerning because of her previous surgery.  The next several minutes were pretty intense as Leslie tried to calm her down and get her breathing normally again. Luckily, she did not go into a seizure, as she has done in the past.

As we were leaving the store, she fell asleep in the car and continued to sleep on our bed when we got home.  At this point, Leslie called her neurologist to get his opinion on what we should be watching for.  He said to bring her in if we started seeing symptoms similar to what we saw pre-surgery, like vomiting, choking, troubling swallowing, etc.  After about an hour of her sleeping, we attempted to wake her up so that she could eat dinner, which took almost 15 minutes of us practically yelling in her face to get her up.  Once we got her up, she ate a whole peanut butter sandwich and chips in no time and was ready to play with her siblings upstairs.  At this point, we thought she was going to be ok.

Overnight, Leslie checked on her while she was sleeping and she responded to Leslie as any normal child would while in deep sleep. Before going to sleep herself Leslie prayed simply for God to give us a very clear sign to know whether or not we needed to take Henley to the hospital. The next morning, Henley didn't really feel like eating anything and wanted to just veg on the sofa.  Then, around 9:30 am our "clear sign" appeared in the form of projectile vomiting, which lasted what seemed like several minutes.  We knew at that point that she needed to go to the ER. Leslie made the call to her dad that has become so routine, yet still alarming "We are taking Henley to the ER, we are going to need some help." So after about an hour of bathing, packing, & handing over the siblings with grandparents, we were on our way.  Luckily, we thought to bring a barf bag with us in the car because she threw up again on the way to the hospital.

Once at the ER, they did a CT scan on her.  After about an hour of waiting for the results, the doctor came in and told us that she had apparently managed to fracture her skull and that she would need to be admitted for observation. We both just looked at each other in shock. Seriously? A skull fracture? That was even remotely on our radar! Come to find out, the fracture is at the same site of her surgery.

After another round of vomiting in the ER we were admitted to the 4th floor (post-surgery/trauma floor). We got settled in our room and aquantied with our nurse Cindy. Henley has been very different than in the past when we were here. She is a year and a half older and much more vocal of her displeasure about being here and the whole process. She has been much more difficult to console and calm this time around which has made us both very sad. It is very hard watching your child potentially being traumatized by an event that you know they have to go through for their own good. 

We ordered dinner and gave Henley one bite and she started throwing up. The nurse brought in more medicine for nausea and we were lucky for her to be able to keep that down. Once the medicine kicked in she was able to finish a little bit of dinner and polish off an entire piece of chocolate cake. So far she has been able to keep that down....although she has not been given the chance to eat again since last night. 

This morning about 8:00 am we got a visit from Henley's surgeon, Dr. Roberts. He walked in and said "You guys just couldn't stay away!" He suggested that since she was already scheduled for post-surgery MRI in September to look at her Chiari, that we might just go ahead and kill two birds with one stone and do that today so that we could get a very accurate picture of not only the skull fracture, but how the rest of everything looks after the trauma. We were on board with that idea and so they said they would get that scheduled ASAP. 

They took Henley back for the MRI around 9:30am and its almost noon and we are still waiting to hear that she is out. They should be bringing her back to the room any minute so that we can see her. We will update again as we have some more infomation. Thanks for all of the FB post and comments, phone calls and texts. As always, we could not do this without the love and support from our amazing friends, family and church!