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| Kellisa doing her best to smile for her school picture while suffering through her undiagnosed shunt infection. |
Kellisa
was slowly dying before our eyes and no one in the medical community was able to figure out what was wrong.
Kellisa's smile and love of life were gone. She was battling high fevers for weeks. Nothing was bringing her temperature down to normal. She was seeing a
doctor every few days and was in and out of the ER and hospitals without any relief. Once again, Kellisa was baffling the doctors.
From early on, Lisa was convinced it was the shunt. After a CT Scan and MRI, we were assured that the shunt was fine. Kellisa's shunt had been in place for a long enough time that a shunt infection was very unlikely. The neurosurgeon
didn’t want to tap the shunt to check the cerebral fluid for an infection
because if it wasn’t infected, the procedure itself carried a 2% risk of
infecting the shunt.
One
afternoon while Kellisa lay lifeless in a hospital bed, Lisa was changing the
channels on the TV and stopped at The Wiggles. Kellisa immediately perked up and started to watch the four colorful singing and dancing grown men for the first time. This was her
first sign of life in days. Once The Wiggles were over, Kellisa drifted back to a deep sleep. This pattern continued for days. Kellisa would use her minimal daily energy to watch The Wiggles.
Frustrated and desperate,
Lisa demanded that the shunt be tapped. The neurosurgeon eventually agreed and I'm sure he just wanted Lisa to stop asking about the shunt. He stuck a needle into Kellisa’s head and pulled out some fluid.
We could immediately tell by the look on the doctor’s face that it didn’t look
good. His eyes literally jumped out of their sockets as he watched the cerebral fluid in the tube. Testing wasn’t necessary; he could tell the shunt was significantly
infected by the amount of debris in the fluid. The neurosurgeon started preparing for emergency brain
surgery.
