Hydrocephalus

[Renee Hicks]

My baby girl was born 6 weeks early and about two weeks after birth she was diagnosed with hydrocephilus. She is now 3.5 months old and is heading in today for her 6th VP shunt. She has had troubles with them blocking and infections. Has been a rough ride for her so far but hoping this is the last one for a while. She is one tough cookie!! Will be nice to get her home all up i have only had her home for about 3 weeks. So as you can imagine we are quite tied of hospitals....

Chloe ended up getting her vp shunt removed and a EVD put in whilst she was filled up on antibiotics to fight an infection, i was told that the infection wouldnt go away while there was a foreign body inside, so shunt came out and a external drain was put in, w as not nice as it works by gravity, i couldnt pick her up unles the nurses clamped the drain and i was only ever allow to hold her at feed times. After 14 days on the antibiotics she was back in theatre to get external drain removed and yet another vp shunt. This time a different shunt was used with built in antibiotics which we are hoping will do the trick as once you have an infection it is more likely for it to return especially if you use the existing hole wher the infection was. They were goin to go through the other side in a fresh site but she had a central line drip on that side which was going to interfere with the path of the tubing.

She is home once again, and so far so good, the sunt does look slighty swollen, like there is fluid leaking at the conection but surgeon said not to worry as its doing the job for now, so i am guessing at some stage we will have to return for yet another revision.

We are told that it is extremely difficult to et a shunt working for long periods of time on a baby until it reaches 6 or 8 months old as their heads are always changing. JUst hope we get longer out of this one.

It has been very hard on me and my husband, but Chloe always come out of it smiling!!!!