Just a quick post to let everyone who has been calling what has happened with Casey. Last Sunday she had a back reflux on which she aspirated into her lungs. We were not able to get her to recover her breathing or heart rate, and she was coughing up blood, so we took her to Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles – this is where we take her for her pulmonary doctors.
After monitoring Casey and seeing that her condition was declining rapidly, they decided to intubate and put her on a ventilator. They also inserted 2 femoral (thigh) central lines for drawing blood and giving medicine.
In addition to the obvious respiratory problems, Casey’s platelet count is our main concern. It has been very low the whole time, and even after getting a transfusion, it is continuing to decline. Since bone marrow produces these cells, they are trying to figure out why Casey’s bone marrow is not working properly. One reason is a rare side effect of her seizure medication, but it could just be her body not being able to adjust to so much stress at once. She will most likely need another transfusion, but we can not continue that indefinitely, so they have mentioned that something similar to chemotherapy may be needed to wipe out whatever is causing this problem.
Her lungs have improved slightly over the last couple days, sounding a little better and her some subtle differences in her xrays. Unfortunately, her lungs were still quite damaged from her last pneumonia a couple months ago, so her baseline xrays were already quite bad.
They have Casey heavily sedated and comfortable – she is a little swollen from the fluids and medicine, but she has opened her eyes a lot the last couple days and shown other signs of strength, so we are hopeful that she will continue to improve and respond well to all the treatments.
Well, that’s all for now – we will try to put an update here about once a week in case we don’t get to talk to everyone.