Thursday, April 28, 2011

Long Hospital stay Part 2


So after 3 long weeks we are still at Brenner's with Zach. A lot has happened, both good and bad but we have not had much progress with the original reason we came here.
After the 2nd week of having his central line in and working and getting TPN through it, he got a major blood bacteria infection. His temperature spiked to 104, he was shaking and throwing up and very listless. His blood culture came back positive for staph and gram positive bacteria. They started him on 2 major antibiotics used to treat MRSA. They continued to take blood cultures everyday and for 3 days his cultures continued to be positive for staph and he continued to have a 104 fever day and night so they pulled his central line on day 4 of his infection. They added another antibiotic and the next day his fever finally broke and stayed gone.
They took him back to surgery 3 days later to have another central line placed. Everything was going good for a week. The day that he was supposed to go have his motility testing done, he woke up with a 102 temp so the test was canceled since he would have to be under anesthesia to have it done. The Dr.'s are working on getting it rescheduled.
Tuesday night he became very modeled looking on his hands and feet and they were also very cold so the on call Dr's ordered more bloodwork. Yesterday they decided he needed a blood transfusion since his hemoglobin was low on the bloodwork. They said his hemoglobin is low because for one he has a chronic disease and for two, they have been taking a lot of blood over the past couple of weeks.  He was givin pre med first since he is allergic to everything. The transfusion only took about 2 hours and did great, he slept through most of it. He unfortunately woke up with another 104 fever so they took more blood cultures and repeat bloodwork.
So far his blood cultures are still negitive for bacteria, which is good. His hemoglobin came up about 2 points, still below normal but much better than the night before. They don't know why he is still spiking high temps and looking bad so they started on an fungal medicine just in case, they also took a fungal culture but it might take a couple of days for results. About mid morning, he became very modeled looking again, had very cold feet and hands and running a high temp so they decided to move him down to the ICU floor to keep a better eye on him. He is actually in the pediatric intermediate care unit, which is a step down from the intensive care unit but right next door to it just in case.
He is having ups and downs today, his vitals are still kinda shaky so he has to stay hooked up to monitors all the time.  His fever comes and goes. They said if it is a fungus causing the problems, we should see improvement within 24 hours so we will see what happens.

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