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This was Maverick this evening. He's such a cutie. You can't see his pretty blue eyes with these pictures - and his eyelashes are so long - they look fake. The past couple of days he's had us on yet another roller coaster ride. He had some issues with his blood gases Thursday night. Friday he was doing really well and I held him. Friday night, I was getting ready to leave and looked at his dialysis bag. The output was green and had some flecks of dark stuff in it. His has always been a peachy color. I started to panic. The attending came in and looked at it and thought the same thing I did... It looked like he may have a perforation in his intestines causing his stool to leak out into his abdomen. They called the pediatric surgery resident in and took some x-rays. Thankfully there was no free air in his abdomen - that is a sign of intestinal perforation (or a hole in his intestines). They would've wanted to do surgery. That in itself would be very complicated for Maverick and would've meant he would've had to be put on a different - riskier- type of dialysis if he made it through surgery. They started him on antibiotics and sent a culture and gram stain. Greg and I stayed close to the hospital last night. His vital signs were still looking ok. This morning we found out there were no organisms on the gram stain and the cultures were negative. This means he probably doesn't have a perforation because your bowel has lots of bacteria and there was none in his fluid. This evening his dialysis output looked pretty normal. The nephrologist hadn't ever seen anything like this and no one really knows what it was. They have thrown out that it might have been a pocket of old blood or something that got disrupted and caused it. I'm just thankful and continuing to pray that it clears up and he has no more issues like that. Through all this, his vitals have been stable. He had his best blood gas in a couple of days this evening. A lot of his blood gas issues are metabolic. They're having to tweak his IV nutrition to help with that. As I'm sitting here typing this I get a call that they've had to restart the dopamine. More when I can - jc