Laughter makes the world go round :)

What a tough girl!

This video was right when we got to the hospital and we were waiting to go downstairs for her surgery. She was in a lot of pain but she was too weak to cry much.


Ryleigh was taking a cat nap while she was waiting to go into the operating room.




This is the day after. If you look closely, you can see some blood on her ID bracelet. Ryleigh decided she no longer wanted her IV and she went ahead and pulled it out!


The white tape on the top of her head is where the incision was made. It is a very small incision and they didn't need to shave any of her hair. She needs to keep the little hair that she has!


This is her surgeon, Dr Cherney :)


Home sweet home!

Our sweet angel

This is how Ryleigh has spent most of the week. On Wednesday Ryleigh could not keeping any of her food down, she couldn't stay awake, and she was just not acting like herself. We called the doctor's office and were able to get her in that day.

The pediatrician, Dr Granwehr, had some of Ryleigh's blood drawn to do some tests. She thought it was probably just a virus, but because Ryleigh was having trouble staying awake, (and with Ryleigh's history), she wanted us to come back Thursday (yesterday).

On Thursday the blood tests came back normal. Ryleigh was only able to eat 2 ounces at a time and she normally has 5 ounces at a time, she was still sleeping a lot, she whimpered a lot, and now she was having a hard time focusing when she would look at us. So Dr Granwehr told us to go have a CT scan done.

The scan revealed that Ryleigh has excess fluid in her brain which is causing the ventricles to swell. Today we spoke with the pediatric neurosurgeon and Ryleigh will have surgery tomorrow. The neurosurgeon, Dr Cherney, studied Ryleigh's CT scan and he said that it looks like there is some tissue that wasn't there before that is now covering the place where the fluid normally drains out of the brain. So the surgery tomorrow is to create a bi-pass for the spinal fluid. If everything goes well with the surgery she will not need a shunt.