At its worst

Before we left the hospital, we were given a disc with Sophie's x-ray images up to that point. We were missing, however, the first one from her day of admission, because it was done at the first hospital. This was the x-ray everyone wanted to see, and kept referring to as "impressive" because it showed how severe her condition was. We finally made a stop today in Biddeford at the hospital to pick up a copy, so here it is...

   

As you can see, one side looks drastically different than the other. The black part you see on the right (her left) is air. That's what a normal lung should look like in an x-ray. All of the white area on the left side shows the fluid that had filled up the cavity where her lung should have been. Her actual lung was collapsed and compressed up near the center of her chest and can't really be seen in the image at this size. The cloudy area in the middle of the healthy lung is her heart, which should have been positioned a bit more centrally but was being pushed by all of the fluid. 

You can also see the curve in her spine. At this point (and for a good part of her hospital stay), she was "splinting" to the side, which means bending toward the area causing pain to help feel more comfortable. It was pretty significant when she first arrived at the hospital and during the first few days after surgery. It got gradually better as the chest tubes were removed and is now completely back to normal again. 

Just for fun, here is a little comparison of x-rays... on the left is the first x-ray that I just posted above. The middle one was taken immediately after surgery... you can see the wires from the monitors she was hooked to, and if you look very closely you can see the chest tubes themselves, but it's pretty hard to make them out at this scale. The image on the right is the x-ray that was taken on March 8th, the day her second chest tube was removed. You can obviously see the improvement and how things progressively got more and more normal looking.

   

Her most current x-ray looks most similar to the right image above, but with even less cloudiness in the bottom of the left side (her right). It's still difficult to look back to those early images and remember what it was like to see them for the first time.