So now I bring you up to speed.

Tiptoe acclimated herself to the portagen, and was doing fair-to-midling with drinking it.  Nowhere near what she was supposed to be doing, but we were making progress every day.   Unfortunately, she was draining a lot more off her lungs.  On Monday,  Jan. 26, they took her off portagen and put her on TPN.  In order to put the TPN in and make it effective, they had to put in a PICC line– think of it as like a thin filament that snakes through the veins and whatnot, to get as near to the center of the body as possible.  From what M told me over the phone, it was a pretty miserable operation; they were not able to get the PICC line into her hands, legs or side; they wound up having to put it in her head.

HER HEAD!

She had this…rigging on the side of her round little skull, and they had to shave off some of her hair, and, and…

Well.  It wasn’t pretty.  But it got the job done.

She was miserable the next few days– trying to eat her blanket, her hands, anything she could get her mouth on.  But the TPN seemed to work; she has produced no fluid since Monday.  The PICC line was taken out yesterday (Friday the 30th); and she’s been back on the portagen since the 29th.  And doing very, very well.  Today she has an x-ray scheduled to make sure that there’s no fluid buildup in her lungs, and that the chest tube isn’t clotted; if it goes well, then the chest tube might come out today or tomorrow.  We’ll wait a while, then they’ll take another x-ray to look for fluid and…

Then maybe we can go home.

Huzzah.