The difference 7 months and spinal fusion makes!

The picture in white was at Grandpa's wedding 7 months ago, the one in purple taken today, one month after her surgery.

She is so much taller!! Sitting straight, and look, she has a neck :)

Stori is out of the hospital again!

Well Satori's ended up at our local hospital with pneumonia, after a day there and not getting any better she was transported to a larger hospital in Reno to PICU.

Luckily we only spent a day in ICU and then got downgraded to a regular room. So after several days on a couple IV antibiotics we were able to bring her home!!

She is still on oxygen and pretty sick but VERY happy to be home and taking full advantage of the intensive K9 therapy here :)

Look what the cat (literally) drug in!

Our kitty just brought this little present to Satori.

We got him or her all cozy in a box and when Jeremy gets home I'll go release the poor little thing in the sagebrush where it came from.

Satori has the box right next to us here on the couch... She is keeping a very good eye on our fuzzy friend!

Tori can't catch a break!!

But she can catch pneumonia. Poor monkey has pneumonia right now. Her back is healing well, and she is needing far less pain meds, but now on antibiotics for the lung gunk...

She is almost all the way through the postcards, and about to start on the regular cards (stuff in envelopes) she's really enjoying the mail.

Thank you all so much!!

She is doing GREAT!!

Satori is LOVING her postcards!!

You can still send them if you like to the address above :)

We are home and she has been up and around in her wheelchair more and more each day. It is unbelievable how quickly she is healing!!!

She just got this super cute stationary from Doodlekins to write to her friend while she is out of school. Her home bound teacher starts next week which she is excited about. Hopefully she'll make it back to school before the end of the school year!

Satori sitting TALL!

Satori has been home from the hospital two days now and today she went out in the back yard with her dogs for a little bit.

I can not believe HOW TALL SHE IS!

I think she is almost 4 inches taller than before the surgery. She is doing very well, still on loads of pain meds and Valium for muscle spasms, but getting better every day!

She has continued to receive a few postcards every day gets so excited when the mail man comes. We've been slowly going through the pile from the hospital and plan to post pictures of some of them soon.

Thanks so much to all of you who participated, it has really made her feel special :)

We are HOME!!

Satori was paroled from UC Davis med center :) Yay, we are HOME!!!

Satori was on TV showing off her postcards

Satori was on KCRA last night showing off some of the TONS of postcards she received from Twitter members all over the world.

VIEW THE TV INTERVIEW

2 things to keep in mind before watching... Satori was very medicated. LOL and as for me, the camera adds 50 lbs right?

Sleep dep takes its toll

All I did was run to the coffee cart for tea, and I managed to misplace Satori.

It took me a full three minutes of confusion after "losing" the entire pediatric ward (and my kid in it) to figure out I was on the wrong floor.

A little light reading for the morning.

Satori spent part of her morning looking through her first batch of postcards.

She was also interviewed by KCRA TV 3 this afternoon and showed off some of them.

Note to all of you planning to be interviewed on TV... Take those pain meds AFTER the TV crew leaves not right before they show up ;)

Today was a loooong day!!

After getting tons of mail and getting out of bed and into her wheelchair for the first time since surgery (which didn't go all so well) Satori is exhausted.

I think the pillow says it all!

Satori's prized postcard!!

Satori got three postcards from The Mythbusters!

They were all autographed and had nice messages.

She was so excited by these!

Thanks especially to Grant!!!!!!!!

Satori checks out her first pile of postcards.

Satori gets some mail

The Mail delivery cart comes with mail for Satori...

Would you like some steel with that?

X-Rays

There is a lot of steel in my kids back!!

The first picture is the upper part of her back, If you look close you can see her vertebrae in between the screws.






The middle picture is a side view of her lower back.





The last one is a view of her pelvis from the front, you can see the rods on either side of her spine and the screws that anchor the bottom into her pelvic bone on either side.

Satori's left lung has collapsed, which we are assured is very common after surgery. We are going to get more aggressive on the pulmonary treatments and hopefully it will re-inflate on it's own.

Everything else is looking really good, her blood count, heart rate and bp are all good!

Surgery went well, Satori came off the ventilator right away! She needed a bit of blood in the night, but all in all she is doing very well.

She is still in ICU and will stay here till her blood pressure stabilizes and her oxygen is a bit better.

Mailing address...

Address for postcards:

I am deleting the hospital address today (April, 6th) since we are hoping to be out of here in the next few days. Satori is LOVING the postcards and asked that I put our address here for anyone who still wants to send one.

Satori Lewis
1 Harbor Road
Dayton, NV
89403 USA

At the risk of repeating myself (which I do often)

We have good insurance, a great surgeon and an excellent hospital!!


**Satori is in need of nothing but exciting postcards**

To see pictures of Tori with her cards or read updates about her condition click here.

Hello!

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Melissa Lewis, Haut Totes on Etsy, as well as Hauttotes on twitter.

My 10 year old daughter Satori has Spinal Muscular Atrophy (type II) She uses a power wheelchair, can't walk, crawl, etc. Despite that she's a rock star!! She has a super sense of humor, gets straight A's even though she misses an average of 40 days of school a year! She's a great sister & daughter & a fantastic person all around.

Because she is so physically weak her body doesn't hold its self up well and she has developed severe scoliosis. The curve of her spine it is now starting to crush her lung, so on March 31 she will have full spinal fusion. They will open her back from the neck all the way down, insert 2 titanium rods, one on either side of her spine, wire the whole thing up and place donor bone in between all the vertebrae. Eventually it will all grow together "fusing" her spine into one long bone.

We are traveling to California to have this done, with an estimated stay in the hospital of 7-10 days. I am hoping to get people to send her postcards from all over. I think that the messages (and pictures) will be fun for her. I also plan to take an atlas and have her mark off states and countries (sneaking in a little geography).