Beautiful Outside - Kind of Crummy In Here

Kind of a crummy day for Bailey today. She got sick during the night last night and ran a pretty high fever this morning. Since she's at risk for infection, the surgeons got on the ball right away doing all sorts of labs and cultures. They inspected her VAD site and it's looking really good. They then decided to take out her central line in her right shoulder and replace it with a PIC line in one of her arms. (A PIC line is like an I.V., but it has a catheter that they feed in a vein up her arm around a "corner" and into a central location in her chest area.) To prepare for that, she couldn't have anything to eat or drink, and slept most of the morning since she didn't feel well. The transport team came up around 1:00 and "attempted" to put a PIC line in. They tried twice on both of her arms. She was well sedated with Versed, but she was in a lot of pain. They had a hard time finding her veins and when they did they kept collapsing, so the transport team gave up, and they decided to send her to I.R. (intervention readiology, or something like that) to have one put in under X-ray. I really wish they would have just started with that. They really knew what they were doing (not that the transport team didn't, they just had bad luck). They used a lot smaller tube to poke with and had the equipment to alleviate all the guess work -- an ultrasound to find a vein and X-ray to feed the line in the proper position in the veins. Poor little thing was in a lot of pain again (and her upper arm was swollen from the failed attempts earlier in the day), but they were very quick and gentle as possible. She is continuing to spike a fever every 6 hours or so, but she was able to eat some cereal this evening. Dr. T felt really bad about Bailey having to go through all this today. He was trying to tell her that it won't hurt any more than an I.V. hurts. And it was making sense to us. But after we returned to our room from I.R., Bailey simply says, "I.V., my butt." She's so glad to have everything done (they even took out her central line - just a few snips of stitches) but exhausted from the stress of the day. She's asleep already again. I got a lot accomplished on the afghan I'm knitting! I hear it was a beautiful day outside today - in the 60's and sunshine. Hope you all got to enjoy it! Hopefully we'll be able to take a stroll outside on the next day like today. I'm going home in the morning. I'll talk to you all on Sunday evening! Have a good weekend, everyone. Angie