363 days

The last days continued....(not for sensitive readers)

So, she was admitted to hospital. They put us into the isolation unit in the paediatrics ward, so we had a room to ourselves although we could see the child in the room next door whose parents, by the way, hardly visited him. I really hate it when you see that. I could never leave my child alone in hospital when they are so sick. Anyway, Kendra was put on a drip and as usual they battled to find a vein for the drip. She developed quite a temperature so I had to wipe her down quite a bit. I must say the nursing staff were very good. One of the nurses from the maternity ward even came to visit as she remembered Kendra from when we were there.

They came and did all sorts of tests, I can't really remember what happened when. I think it was the first night that they called in the specialist who had done her op(in 2005) to do a scan and they had to wheel her through to the radiology dept. They had to disconnect her from the room's oxygen supply and take an oxygen tank with. I remember the nurse disconnecting the drip and the doctor freaking out because he said they would have to redo the whole thing and she was saying that it was the type of drip that you can remove and put back without air bubbles. None of which put me at ease with the entire process, I must say, though I was inclined to agree with the nurse as I had seen them do that before. Anyhow, I spent a rather uncomfortable night in the armchair, waking up most times when they came to do stats.

The next day they did some more tests and then the doctor decided to move us to ICU. She said it was because they have better monitoring equipment there but I think that they were not letting on to us how serious it really was. And my poor little baby was so swelled up from the drip as they put so much fluid into her and had her on a really strong antibiotic. They still couldn't tell me exactly what was wrong. In ICU she had a catheter in and you could see clearly that there was blood in her urine. They also put a tube into her stomach to drain fluid as she seemed to have a build up of blood there too. I spent the last night in ICU on yet another armchair. That night I woke up in the middle of the night to see that they had called out the doctor on standby to come and have a look at her. I asked him then about her heart (he is a heart specialist) and he said it seemed fine. I told him that I was concerned that her heart could not take it since there is a risk of heart problems in Jacobsen Syndrome babies. He told me her heart was fine.

So she had tubes all over the show and I knew that she was in a lot of pain most of the time she was in the hospital as she would lie there and moan all the time. Anyone who knew Kendra knew that she was generally a very contented baby (except when camping and at parties, she was not too keen on those) and I believe had quite a high pain threshold as she did not cry a lot. So to hear her moaning constantly like that was truly heartbreaking. I just felt so helpless. My baby was in pain and there was nothing I could do. Yes, I did pester the doctor to increase her pain medication but there was a limit to how much they could give her.

I popped home each morning to have a quick shower and out at night to quickly have supper with Gathry and Branston but other than that stayed at the hospital the whole time. I left poor Gathry to sort out Branston and homework etc. and he also visited regularly so that I could take a bit of a break.