Day 750 - 🚑 105.3 Fever Emergency 🤒🥵
Thursday, January 19th, 2023
The DAY was great just visiting with Mom's Godmother while Dad took work calls upstairs. Most of the fam went to a park. When they got back Dad had started on James' nightly care around 8pm.
Now the NIGHT...At 8:15pm Dad got Mom and let her know that James threw up and felt really warm. It was just clear, probably a lot of mucus and gastric juices, but not food from his intestine. Mom took his temp and it was 105.3. James was very lethargic, not able to stay sitting up and his eyes were rolling into the back of his head. Mom made the call to go to the hospital. We packed up all of our equipment as fast as possible with the help of some cousins we were out the door in a few minutes. We skipped his trach care because this was urgent. Looking on Google Maps we were 30 minutes from Nemours in Orlando and 1 hour from St. Joe's in Tampa which is where we lived for 8½ months. We decided to drive to Nemours. It would be an additional 30 minutes east but we needed to get to a hospital asap. In addition, our last few visits at St. Joe's wasn't great so we didn't actually want to go there anyways.
We pulled up to the ER around 9:30pm and only waited for a short bit before being taken back. When your toddler is on a ventilator you get priority. They took his temperature and it only read 99. Then they took it again it was 102. It was bouncing all over the place. We let them know he had thrown up before we came in and they got him in a room in the ER immediately. The nurse that did his IV was the fastest ever and only did it once! They did all sorts of tests including bloodwork, respiratory by doing a nasal swab, and a sputum culture. The ER was very thorough and communicated everything. They proactively gave him a dose of Cipro via IV since he most likely had a trach infection due to the increase respiratory rate, increase in needing to suction, and yellow secretions. James' respiratory panel came back positive for OC43; a coronavirus that is pre-COVID. The sputum culture would take 4 days. James then threw up and soaked a whole towel. After that another doctor came in to let us know that we would be admitted into the PICU as soon as they could get a room ready. We stopped his feeds, even though he wasn't throwing up good, just mucus. He was getting IV fluids to balance his electrolytes and keep him from getting dehydrated.
Our only complaint in the ER was that there was a young Indian male doctor who came in only once to ask us if we would like to be transported by ambulance to St. Joe's in Tampa because "they know him there". 🙄 Ummm no, 1) It's 4am and neither Mom or Dad would be able to drive 1½ hours on no sleep 2) James needs care now, not another 1½ hours from now 3) We didn't want to go there because we the last few times we've had bad experiences. It seems like the ER was just trying to get rid of patients so they could meet their numbers. Short after speaking with us we heard this same doctor in the hall outside our room talking about how "there is no respiratory distress and there is no reason to be here". Super unprofessional.
We were transferred into the PICU until 4:30am, so we spent 5½ hours in the ER. It took another 1½ hours to get settled in to go to sleep at 6am. None of us had slept yet. Mom was going over James' condition thus far with one doctor and a few nurses while helping the respiratory therapists setup the ventilator. Mind you this was literally just repeating everything we already went over in the ER. Dad was going over all of James' medications with who we thought was a pharmacist, but come to find out later it was another physician. There was definitely a language barrier because he just wasn't understanding basic things and asking questions that anyone in the medical field would know. Mom ended up needing to switch places with Dad to see if she could try and help. It was insane! This guy could not grasp the concept of his continuous feeds that run at 45ml/hr for 20 hours. He kept asking about the size of the cartons being 250mls. 😳 Mom explained how it didn't matter how the packaging came, what's important is the rate for the feedings. This is one of the reasons it took 90 minutes to be "settled" in the PICU. One thing this hospital needs to improve on is that there were too many cooks in the kitchen!
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| Morning cuddles 🤗 |
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| Walking in to Nemours in Orlando |
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