Yaya Update

Okay here we go…sweet Yaya weathered the surgery beautifully as you already know. We will likely go back to have it checked sometime in the next week or so. The cold virus about took us all out. She has just now been able to go to sleep and breathe through the night (that started just 3 nights ago on March 14). HOWEVER, this nasty virus has lingering undesirable effects. Yaya is now suffering through what is called Transient Synovitis. No I didn’t sneeze…that’s a real thing. It is when your body gets a virus, or medications that cause your own antibodies to get confused and so they attack your joint linings. Its other name is postinfectious arthritis. In Yaya’s case she has what feels like arthritis in her left hip and possibly in her right. It is, praise the Lord, temporary, 1-3 week duration. We discovered this as we kept trying to gauge her mouth pain. We would ask her if anything hurt. She would always pat her left leg; and I mean always. We dismissed it at first thinking she was just mis-reporting or confused. But she never said her mouth hurt, just her leg. She has done this since right after she got that stinkin’ virus! When she began to limp and drag her left leg, which is her strong leg, we thought we should take her in. So I took her in last week thinking I was crazy or she was growing and it was growing pains. One quick exam had us running down to Children’s South for x-rays and a blood draw. What I thought was nothing became mildly serious. Because we have no history on her we had to rule out first: hip displasia. You know that thing that Labrador Retrievers get…yeah that. Then we had to rule out bone or joint infection. At 6:00 pm that same day our doctor called and said that her hips looked great. He thought the blood work would be fine and it was just the synovitis. Whew. But at 8:30 am the next morning I received a call from the doctor again who informed me that the blood work was not fine and that I need to high tail it down to Children’s downtown to see an Orthopedic doctor to rule out anything serious. And by high tail it, he meant it. Like drop my Eggo waffle and throw on some clothes and walk out the door. Which I did. It wasn’t pretty. No make up. Hair in all the wrong directions, which is saying something since I have spikey hair to begin with. Eric met me and the girls at Children’s with McDonalds and we fed the girls the food I brought from home. In about an hour we were leaving the hospital with the verified synovitis diagnosis. Nothing else sinister, praise be to God. So we just ride this out with Ibuprofen and it should go away soon.

She is finally getting an appetite back. I fed her 8 containers of food today. She normally does anywhere from 9-12. I have decided that it is time to teach her to feed herself. She has decided that she doesn’t want to. But I will be forging ahead in that direction tomorrow regardless. I figure it is one step closer to getting her to actually eat food. Plus, it is really time consuming to feed her, not that I mind…but it gets old. We aren’t even going to discuss feeding therapy until April. We do however, begin PT again this week. She has lost a lot of ground with this surgery and now the synovitis. Her strength is gone. It feels a little like starting over but I know it will come back quickly. We also start speech this coming up week. We will only do 30 minute sessions once a week for now I believe. We had the meeting with the school (State early intervention) this past week and it went really well. She has to be evaluated by their teams with their tests all over again. It is weird because they have to call in a sign language interpreter! I’ve never been on this side of the fence before and it is unsettling! I’m all like, “Who are they gonna get?! Will I like them? Will I approve? Can’t I just call one of my friends to do it?” Since Yaya has no language delay due to her expressive sign language they need the interpreter and I can’t do it because of dual roles and conflict of interest. It just never occurred to me that we’d ever need to use an interpreter! Cool and weird at the same time. They will evaluate for Speech (that is the big one), PT and OT. But hopefully Yaya won’t need all those services by the time August rolls around, just speech. The state only provides services during the school year. So when Yaya turns three on June 30th we will have to pay for Yaya’s services in the gap between her birthday to the beginning of the state school year. But God is so faithful, it will only be a few weeks. And hopefully we will only need speech by then.

Yaya’s anxiety levels are going down and she is starting to level out again some. She did great when I went away for my conference for 2 nights. No long lasting repercussions there! Yay Yaya! All in all, she is doing really quite well. The surgery and subsequent virus was hard on her but she is bouncing back really quicker than I had expected. But that is what our little fighter does, she always exceeds our expectations.