First the good news – Rachel got a visit from a furry friend today at the hospital.

The bad news – Rachel’s had a pretty miserable couple of days. She had the halo traction device put in place yesterday in the OR (under sedation to make her sleep, not general anesthesia.) Her head has been a lot of pain since then. She was already not tolerating the pain well this morning, even with pain meds, and then they tightened the screws and added more weight to the traction, making it unbearable. She hasn’t been able to eat much of anything because her head hurts too much when she eats. The pain meds and lack of food has also made her nauseous and she’s thrown up twice. They put her on IV fluids tonight so she doesn’t get dehydrated. They also tried a different anti-nausea med that also helps headaches and both her head and her nausea are a little better after that.

For those who don’t know what halo traction is (which is probably most of you, since they rarely use it anymore), it involves inserting 4 pins/screws directly into the bones in your skull. The pins are in a round device that goes around your head like a halo, which is then attached to a rope and pulley system that’s weighted down with weights. They started with 10 pounds of weight and then added 4 more pounds this morning. Mind you, she only weighs about 90 pounds. This traction is to attempt to get the T3 vertebra that’s pushed out of alignment back into place prior to Thursday’s surgery. Here are some pictures of the halo device and the rope and weights:

Rachel’s surgeon stopped by this afternoon. She will be first on the schedule on Thursday, though the ORs start a little later on Thursdays; it’ll probably be around 10am. The surgery should take around 4 hours, depending on how much the traction has helped beforehand, so this will be about half as long as her last surgery in September. They will use the halo traction during surgery to finish aligning her spine prior to replacing the supporting hardware and then the halo will be removed (or 98% sure it’ll be removed, the surgeon said and that he can’t envision a scenario where it won’t be removed.) The same plastic surgeon as last time will be in the OR to do the close as well.

They aren’t supposed to be tightening the screws or adding any more weight tomorrow and the surgeon’s fellow said that the pain should calm down a bit after she gets used to the added weight, so hopefully tomorrow will be slightly better.