Sadly, instead of coming home this weekend, we spent even more time in the NICU. Annelise is having Bradycardias (severe drops in her heart rate) when she is refluxing because she's holding her breath. Poor little thing, it's very painful for that fluid to come back up and she's holding her breath to help keep it down, which causes her heart rate to drop. When this happens, she's at risk for aspirating that fluid into her lungs. We know that she's not aspirating a lot of fluid into her lungs because she's not showing signs of that. However, she could be aspirating tiny bits of it. Over time, she could develop pneumonia if this is happening. So for right now, she's staying put at CHOP.
Her team of doctors and nurses aren't just sitting around and watching her though. We're going to do 2 studies to see how bad the reflux is. These will tell us where we go from here. One possible route is another surgery to insert a G-tube and do a Nissen procedure. Both of those will get her out of the NICU. The Nissen procedure will tighten that intersection of her esophagus and stomach to help stop the reflux. The G-tube is similar to the current NG tube that she has in, but it's just in her stomach. We would feed her through there and the NG tube would go away. Another route if it's not that bad is increasing her medication and a Brady-watch. We would have to go at least 2 days without a Brady before being released.
So it seems like we're still near the end of our stay at CHOP, but a little hiccup in our release plans. We'll get there, just not this week probably.
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