Back so soon?

Yes, tomorrow afternoon we are heading back to Children's with dancing girl and her road show.

Like my dress? My Grampa picked it out.

Hopefully it will be a mercifully short visit with Dr. Jennings in his clinic hours but we have reached a point where we need his expertise/reassurance that things are okay after her last surgery. Ellie is doing well and singing, signing and dancing for us all day long but her pesky numbers don't match her mood or temperament.

In the last few days, even though we have kept her g-tube feeds relatively low (~15-17ml/hour) her ostomy output has jumped back to a level that is close to where it was before her most recent surgery (~800-1000 ml/day) and the number of poops has decreased to 1 a day at most. This is exactly what prompted that most recent surgery and after a couple days of watching the daily totals go up and up, we gave a call and got a slot to see Dr. Jennings tomorrow to discuss her recovery/progress.

There are a bunch of things that could be going on and we want to get his take on where we stand.

The easiest explanation is that her gut is still adapting to the new configuration and the tiny little fingers that line the inside of her gut are still growing back: These can take many weeks to grow back and if this is a normal thing than we will go home and wait and change lots of cotton balls.

Another explanation is that the plumbing has rearranged itself and re kinked. That would be a real bummer and we really hope that this isn't the case.

Then there is a the mystery solution like gut bugs or yeast but we don't see any real signs of this like gas or smelly balls. we know that something is up when Abby can say, with a perfectly straight face, 'Gib this room smells like balls!'

This may be all for naught but it will be good to have someone other than each other tell us that things are okay since her numbers show that something has changed since the first few days that we were home and having such good results.
If we just stopped weighing everything we'd never know anything was wrong.

Damned green book of numbers....

By the way wanna know the exact weight of any diaper in the last four months? Yeah, we've got it along with computer archives of every day's totals since December 2006. It keeps us from guessing and the daily total is often among the last things Abby and I say to each other each night.

We sleep better knowing the statistics of Ellie's gut. Odd but true.