An iron constitution

As Abby and I changed an early morning ostomy bag on Tuesday morning I looked up to see the most amazing thing that I have seen in a long time: At 7 AM, my dear wife was was alternating between 1) changing Ellie's ostomy bag and 2) eating a bowl of Raisin Bran.

Wipe wipe wipe, bite of cereal, wipe wipe wipe, bite of cereal.

Right on the same table was her bowl and the emesis basin.

No time to do both separately, I guess.

No kidding. A damn super hero.

Things are very busy for us these days and unfortunately keeping the world up to date on the adventures of Gut Girl often falls off the agenda by the time that we have taken care of Ellie and then, in no particular order:

• done some work on the new house (Abby's to do list is multiple pages, but we are at a point where we could move in tomorrow if we needed to)
  

• walked the best dog in the world,

• gone to work (can't forget to do that everyday, the fish in the ocean need lots of help),

• watched a Red Sox game,

• read the last Harry Potter, and
  

• started to read the new Harry Potter

With all of that going on and Ellie being very stable these days, blog posts just don't make it on to the list.

The very brief rundown is that Ellie is now over 11 kg (~24 pounds), she grew 2.5 inches between doctors appointments last month and eats everything we give her including avocado with lime and pretzel sticks.

Her ostomy is still doing its tricks and she still poops for us once a day like clockwork-usually very early in the morning. Unfortunately for short gut kids pooping isn't a big deal and it doesn't wake her up so we often find her in a pool of poop in the morning. 5 AM sponge baths are very common when the Huggies super-duper-extra-absorbent-mother-of-all-nighttime diapers won't hold. We are working on our timing and have been improving our performances to catch poops early.

Poop plus a central IV line is a very bad thing.

All of this bowel action amazes her surgeon whose intestinal plumbing handiwork actually works as designed- allowing most of the food to go out the ostomy but some to keep going down to give her colon a workout for the day that she is reattached.

We still aren't discussing a reconnection surgery yet. since her bowel was so dilated for so long we are leery of it returning to its former self if we don't give it time to get strong.

So we change a lot of ostomy bags- 2-3 a week is par for the course.

Ellie is happy as ever, running around and climbing on everything that she can find.

Just another day for us.

T-minus 29 days until we ease on down the road. Hopefully this will be our last move a for a long time.