Riley Eve Casey

This update will be short and sweet... Things didn't go according to plan as you may well have noticed. We had our Thursday appointment with our doctor; we were quite confident that we would get the tick of approval to head back to Mackay. There were some signs that we shouldn't have been so confident; namely that Riley would wake up with a puffy face that wouldn't go away until close to mid-morning. He had flagged this upon her discharge last Monday and said that he would check in on it for her follow up appointments. He pulled up her Xray and it showed that there was an excess of fluid built up on her right side. The anticipated trip back home by the weekend was not to be. She would need to take extra medication to temper it and he would want to check in on her a few days later to see if it worked. If it hadn't we would be moving into getting a chest drain put back in which we all didn't want. He said there was not enough fluid there to warrant that option b...

Riley's last drain is out! Plus her oxygen got removed as well so now she is just breathing for herself.  All of this happened not without a fight though! We spent the past couple of days anxiously watching the drains to see just how much was coming out. On Thursday it was 50ml, Friday was 15ml and Saturday was barely 5ml. We knew that the magic number was under 20ml; so when the doctors were conferring with one another they cautiously said maybe on Saturday the drain could come out. But then the surgeons came in and said "Maybe in a couple of days it could come out". If you ever get put through an experience like this; expect that nobody is on the same page. You will have so many people telling you so many different things;  we have learned to just wait and see.  But in the end it was decided it could come out and Riley was not on board. Chalk it up to so many times over this past week us having to trot her off to do something uncomfortable and trying to encourag...