December 29, 2005
December 29, 2005 | Updates
Just letting everyone know that we are back at Primary Children’s hospital. Samuel didn’t sleep long last night - about an hour. Then he was awake on and off until about 1 am. At 1 am, I got him out of bed and his mouth was a mess with blood everywhere and he became very agitated once again. By 1:30 am, I woke Tom and called Primary Children’s to ask what we should do. Samuel was biting his mouth again and his fever was 103 despite the consistent doses of tylenol and motrin. The doctor asked us to come to Primary Children’s. We quickly packed our bags, gave Samuel a bunch more medication to help him sleep on the way and left.We arrived at the Emergency Room around 4 am. It took nearly 3 hours for a doctor to finally come and see Samuel. Around 7 am, I again medicated Samuel to calm him after we decided it could be another few hours before we got any results from the ER docs. They finally showed up with some Lortab to help calm Samuel around 9 am. We told them we didn’t need it anymore since we had calmed him with medication we brought from home. Then we waited for them to admit us to the hospital.
It took until nearly 2 pm before we were admitted to a room. In the meantime, they ran blood cultures, took urine samples, x-rays, secretion samples and even a spinal tap to try and figure out what was causing Samuel so much upset. Just before moving us to our room, they informed us that Samuel has RSV along with a slight aspiration pneumonia. They placed him on a new antibiotic that works well for aspiration pneumonia. But RSV is a virus and cannot be treated by antibiotics. It will simply have to run its course and we will have to hope that Samuel can hold his own through it.
Samuel’s fever finally broke around 1 pm though the ER doctors NEVER gave him one cc of medication - not even tylenol! I don’t know what we would have done and what he would have suffered through if we hadn’t brought his medications from home and provided them ourselves. It was definitely frustrating and the worst service we have ever received in an ER.
Since his fever broke, Samuel has been pretty lethargic. We are back to his regular scheduled medications, except we did add 1/2 doses of his tranxene back to his schedule simple because he shouldn’t have to experience any withdrawals in the midst of all this. The dental team did come and look at his mouth. There is nothing they can do, or course, for basically missing tooth except watch to make sure what is left of it isn’t painful because a nerve is exposed. However, the 3 teeth surrounding that tooth are extremely loose and there is one that they fear he may loose also. They fitted him for a bite guard even though they were pretty certain he wouldn’t keep it in his mouth. I convinced them that something was better than nothing even if I had to hold it in his mouth when he is upset.
Samuel is still holding his food down and is also receiving some IV fluids. He is sleeping most of the time. His mouth looks so sore and he has some pretty yucky stuff coming out of his nose. He also sounds congested when he coughs. RSV is rampant here. Every room we pass, including Samuel’s, has signs on the door warning of infection and all the doctors and nurses wear gowns, masks and gloves when they enter each room, including ours. They say every room is full and RSV has been bad this year. Hopefully, it won’t be too bad for Samuel.
Keep the little guy in your prayers. It’s a lot for such a sweet boy to have to suffer, but everything is for a reason and will be for his benefit and ours in the eternities. Just pray he won’t suffer any more than necessary and that God will watch over him and care for him. We hope he gets better soon so we can go back home. For some reason, this isn’t our favorite place :-)!
Love,
The Jewkes
P.S. Tom has already headed back home with the boys - just so everyone knows they’re being taken care of.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
TrackBack URI
