Back in the Hospital

Post date: Sep 25, 2009 4:40:50 AM

I've been meaning to post an update because we have so much good news to share recently. Unfortunately my pocrastination got the best of me, so now those other excitingly good news has to wait until I have more time... Because Connor is back in the hospital as of Wednesday with another central line infection.

So that's the bad news. The not-so-bad news is that he is feeling his usual chipper self and seems to be responding well to the antibiotics.

What happened? Well, Connor gets nursing care at night right now which we are SO thankful for because it allows us some sleep! He had been cheerful enough when we went to bed Tuesday night and left him in the good care of his nurse that night. Apparently that didn't last. He had been fussing all night, tossing and turning and crying. At four in the morning, he started running a fever - 99.8 degrees. She woke us up to let us know sometime after 5am. By just past 6am it had climbed to over 100 and by 7am it was 102.4 degrees. His cutoff for us to take him into the hospital is 100.4 F, so this was definitely a trip to the ER.

We gave him some Tylenol (he was shivering with chills from the fever by now) and packed up for the hospital, waking big brother up to take him into school first. We arrived at the children's hospital ER by 8am and saw some familiar faces. They remembered us too. I never know to be glad or sad when hospital staff recognize us by either face or name. It was the usual spiel of taking temperatures, blood work and waiting for test results.

A few hours later, we figured he didn't have the flu (with the caveat of a 30% chance of false negative). The ER doctor was in to talk with us (he was one who recognized us - we've seen him at least three times now) and we were discussing the option to go home and wait for further test results when Connor's Tylenol started wearing off and his fever began to climb again. He started shivering, poor baby. We decided to wait a little longer and the doctor was going to call Infectious Disease and GI for consults. In the meantime, we had to wait another hour before Connor could get more Tylenol.

When he returned he gave us the option to go home and wait for results from labs that might show if he has an infection or, with Connor's history of line infections, go ahead and get admitted to the hospital. This was a delimma because if we went home and he did have a line infection, we would have to go back to the ER and go through the ER process to be admitted. But if he had a little cold and no line infection, he didn't necessarily need to be in the hospital. Thinking about how we have never come into the hospital with a fever and NOT been admitted, we opted to go ahead and be admitted. It's no fun being in the hospital and it's even less fun waiting in the ER. Even though this decision was made at about 11am, we still didn't get to a room until sometime around 5pm. Connor got his first dose of IV antibiotics while we waited in the ER for a hospital room.

Turns out we made a good choice because by 7pm, his culture had turned positive and showed that he did indeed have an infection. From past experience, if we had gone home we would have returned that evening to probably wait until 3 or 4 in the morning before getting admitted to a hospital room - and then we would have had to stay up longer and get settled in, provide all of Connor's information so the doctors and nurses had the info they needed for his complicated feeding schedule and long list of meds, and then wait some more for the admitting doctor to write the needed orders. Getting a room by early evening meant I had at least a shot of getting to bed before Thursday morning - and I did, even if it was almost 11:30pm. ;-)

So here we are. Back in the hospital. We requested our usual wing and floor and they managed to find us a room on 3P, so it's nice to see nurses and care partners that already know him. They are amazed at how good he looks! :-)

All things considered, it could be worse. Since his dose of IV antibiotics in the ER, he has not run a fever. And he is his usual cheerful and pleasant self (although he does have a pretty mean streak of stubborness). We are hopeful that this stay will be the usual 5-7 days and then we will get to go home to finish his IV antibiotics treatment ourselves.

Here are some photos taken in the ER with mom and dad, and one photo with a nurse who has known and cared for Connor since last October and through his previous hospitalizations. (Yup, we brought the camera and took pictures - there's really not much else to do as it's a deadzone in the ER room with no connectivity to anything with the outside world.)