The Weekend

Clayton came home on Thursday for another period of waiting it out.  And in true form, he has had a headache both nights he's been here.  Absolutely crazy how he didn't have one headache in the hospital, but has them like clockwork here.  They come on each night around two or three and it takes him until noon the next day to get over them.  By one or two o'clock in the afternoon his eyes return to normal and he seems ready to try normal activities (although he's just too weak to do much of anything).  These past two evenings have been pretty normal except for trying to keep him laying flat most of the time.  (Laying flat helps temper the overdraining of the shunt).  In the meantime, we're on diaper duty overtime since all this extra fluid were pumping in him seems to fly right through!

Thank you so much to everyone for your prayers and well wishes.  While we are still exhausted, this round of headaches seems to be going better because we've changed our plan of attack.  We were giving him oxycodone for pain, and while it helped initially to get him to sleep, the craziness that followed when he was awake was just too much to take.  We've been using ibuprofen more this go around and we have tylenol with codiene if we need something stronger.  Cutting out the oxy seems to have cut out about half of the stress we were dealing with. 

We're just taking it day by day, praying the headaches disappear and looking forward to our follow up appointment in a couple of weeks.  Hopefully we'll be able to get back to some sort of routine, even if it means Clayton's day starts at noon for a while.