Saturday Morning Update

I will start with the positives. Alex and I both slept well from about 10 until 4. Alex was much more comfortable and our nurse knew we were so tired so tried to be extra quiet for us.

Unfortunately shortly after 4 I heard some commotion and “39.5”. So for my friends who aren’t used to hospital life. Temps get taken in C and 39.5 equals a high temp (around103). My mom senses immediately got my tired butt out of bed as the lights flipped on. Our room was flooded with people and activity.  So a little about the way things work at cook children’s...they have a screening that is completed whenever they do vital signs. The screening assigns a number and if you score higher than a certain number you trigger a “sepsis alert”. It starts a chain reaction where the charge nurse, a respiratory therapist, the hospital isn’t on call and a Nurse Practitioner from the PICU come and evaluate and potentially give orders. Alex’s high fever and low oxygen saturation’s along with a few other factors triggered this alert. Ultimately, the PICU NP and I both felt he looked way too good and stable to even consider the PICU. However she did order some labs and a chest X-ray. At this point I do not have results other than word on the street is that there was quite a bit of gas in the small intestine that they could see so we may be doing another X-ray later. I will update more as I get more information.

After things settled down  and Alex and I fell back asleep, apparently his respiration’s were low. So the nurse turned off both pain pumps without talking to anyone. AHHHHHH!!!! Can you hear the screams. One of the medications was purposely chosen because it does not effect respiration’s, but she stopped that as well so Alex woke up in quite a bit of pain again and we are playing a bit of catch up. I am going to ask the pain team to put a note in the chart that no one should stop the pumps without calling them.

Our surgeon is here again today so we will see him and our GI comes on call today so we will see him as well along with the hospitalist and pain team. I am hoping for some answers and an uneventful day.

I will update later. Thank you for the prayers!
Ali