Goodbye Morphine!

After a hellacious day and night yesterday with Hannah awake and uncomfortable most of the day, today was a welcome change.

Because we proved that morphine, even at 20 mg, had no effect on Hannah, we decided to discontinue it and replace it with methadone for pain control.   So from early morning on, she had no more morphine.  The methadone didn’t arrive at our house until late evening tonight.

But….Hannah was a bit calmer today and slept most of the day!   Yes, I welcome her sleeping most of the day if it means she isn’t in pain or agitated.   She woke up a few times, was not near as agitated, and she went back to sleep with only the help of Benedryl.  We haven’t used the chloral hydrate since 11 am — this is huge!  Right now, that is more than 14 hours since her last chloral, which is a record since we started this whole process.

Best of all — she let me hold her again!  When she woke up this afternoon and I scooped her up and sat on the couch, she didn’t try and throw herself out of my arms.  She still is completely out of it, and I’m almost certain I got a lot more out of the sweet cuddle time than she did, but it was heaven for me.

She also let my sister-in-law cuddle with her for almost 45 minutes tonight as well as being smothered lovingly with kisses by my two little nieces.

Then just a bit ago, she was up for almost thirty minutes cuddling with me before the pain and agitation started and I had to give her Benedryl.  She is back to sleep now.

I don’t know if the methadone is having any effect, but she got it this evening a few hours ago so it definitely didn’t have the same reaction as the morphine, which is good.

Perhaps the morphine was causing more problems than we realized.  After all, no meds seem to work normally for my sweet girl.

Even though it was only about 90 minutes collectively of cuddle time, it was 90 minutes that I was able to just be in love with her, caress her, and feel her body snuggle against mine.

I’ll take it.