With Kathryn as a mom, it shouldn't be a surprise that the first thing that Lillian got to do after getting home and waking up was to take a bath. Annabelle was pretty happy to have her sister home too, but it had been a long day for Lillian, and soon she was sound asleep. Katie and I had to give Lillian her medicine for the first time, which was an interesting if ultimately uneventful thing.
The next day, Annabelle really got down to business with Lillian. Her sister was finally home, it was time to play!
Of course, Lillian might have been a little too bundled to play with Annabelle, but Annabelle was going to play with her. We took both girls out for a while, which to our surprise was more tiring for them than for us.
The next few days were interesting and exciting for the girls as they adjusted to their new roles, but relatively uninteresting in the long run. Annabelle continued to love playing with her sister and talking about her, Lillian just got used to being out of the hospital. We also had some visitors, most notably, her cousin Robert.
Robert was always ready to strike a pose, Lillian was less so, preferring instead to make a face. Overall, everything was good at home, good until August 29th that is. The 29th was Lillian's welcome home party, but during the day we noticed that she was spitting up more than normal and had what looked to be bad thrush. Only when she became completely lethargic though did we really think something was up. At the advice of Seattle Children's, we brought her back into the hospital to be evaluated. They determined that in addition to having thrush and a yeast infection as we suspected (both brought about by a wide spectrum antibiotic we gave her earlier to combat a suspected infection), Lillian was also pretty dehydrated. This doesn't sound like a huge deal, but was actually the biggest deal of all, as when a HLHS baby with Norwood circulation gets dehydrated, they stop sending blood through their shunt to the lungs. This obviously isn't ideal, and was probably the reason why Lillian was so lethargic. They did have some problems getting an IV in while in the ER due to her small veins, taking 4 tries to get an IV in to give her fluids and draw labs. Even though the labs looked normal, they wanted to keep her overnight, so she was readmitted, not even a week after she had left.
Our overnight stay soon turned into two days overnight, as the thrush infection looked pretty bad. We had started to suspect that the thrush was the actual cause of the dehydration, so we had to make sure it was gone. But we were able to take her home again on the 31st, so a relatively short stay after all.
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