Starving artist

Tessa's new kidney continues to progress in the right direction as well as her vital signs so those are the important things and we are thrilled about that. So far, no signs of any rejection or severe damage to the kidney caused by surgery...priority numero uno and dos!

Less important but still a bit concerning is that she's having a difficult time keeping food down. Of course major surgery involving general anesthesia will cause nausea for several days after surgery but here we are a week later and we can't get Tessa to eat much because every time she does, she throws up...so nutrition is becoming an issue. Some of the causes include the fact that there is an ever expanding list of medications that she's on, fluid levels that are all out of whack, high blood pressure, and an oversized kidney that is bullying her stomach and other organs. All, some, one or maybe none of those factors is causing her to vomit every few hours. The doctors still can't figure it out. Frankly their methods for problem solving this appear to be mediocre at best...but I'll go into that issue another time.

In the meantime, we are initiating our own highly sophisticated, super top secret, patent pending system for deducing the cause of the nausea through a radically advanced data analysis matrix with built in logic. We call it P.O.E.: "process of elimination". Surely you've never heard of it. I don't think UCSF is on to it yet but they could be any day, hence the patent-pending part.

Anyhow, we'll get to the bottom of it before Tessa wastes away.

To pass the time and take her mind off the nausea, Tessa is methodically depleting the playroom of all of it's art supplies. They are officially out of Elmer's glue, dot pens, animal puffy stickers and watercolors (see pic attached). It's pretty amazing how focused she gets when in the middle of an art project. My mom, dad, Tessa and I spent over an hour creating things and there were about 5 sentences spoken the entire time...one of them was "I have to spit up" after which she proceeded to vomit, scream, calm down, clean up, and then quietly went back to her watercolors. Unbelievable! True dedication to her craft.

I'll leave things at that for now. More to come tomorrow.