Day 53

What a day. My uneasy feeling before bed last night proved to be "something." I was worried about her all night last night and didn't sleep well--checking on her breathing, heart rate, and temperature numerous times and waking up every time I head a peep out of her. Her temp was higher than normal last night but never got high enough to be considered a fever. If she would have spiked a fever last night, we would have taken her to the emergency room immediately.

She was a very sick princess this morning when we went to the hospital for dialysis. But not you're usual sick child. She has a blood infection from her dialysis catheter. They drew blood cultures first thing this morning to determine if it was an infection or not. I could tell from the way she was acting this morning that it was. Her respiratory and heart rate were high, she was gagging much more than normal, she ended up spiking a fever of 39.3 C on dialysis, and was beyond misrable. I felt so bad for her. She's had 3 or 4 blood infections before from her dialysis line but this was the worst I've seen her. Scary.

They gave her two broad-spectrum antibiotics after dialysis to hopefully cover whatever 'bug' caused the infection. Usually it takes 24-48 hours to see what grows from the blood cultures to determine what bug it is. Then they choose the specific antibiotic accordingly. But Claire's blood cultures starting growing within a few hours. The faster it grows, the more serious the infection.

She started feeling a little better after she got the antibiotics and a little rest. How nice it would have been to take her home and just let her sleep. But we still had to go to the orthopedic. The good news there is that we got to take off the cast on her right leg. The doctor kind of left it up to us as to whether we should take it off or leave it on. The x-ray still didn't show that anything was definitely broken, so it could go either way. I decided to have it removed and if she still does have pain or discomfort in the next few days, we'll put another one back on. Might as well let her have a little less restriction if there isn't anything major going on with it. So far, she's seemed very happy to have it off. She's been bearing weight on it without any discomfort so I feel good about that. The left leg is aligned properly and healing well. The plan is to go back in 3 more weeks, take off the full leg cast and replace it with a below-the-knee cast for another 3 weeks. Like they said, it will take her bones longer to heal than normal...so they're projecting about 7 weeks total for cast time.

The doctor called before Claire and I even got home from the orthopedic and said that because Claire's blood culture came back positive SO quickly, he wanted her to stay the night in the hospital tonight just so they could keep an eye on things. They expect she'll be okay since she's had a dose of the antibiotics (which she'll continue to get for the next two weeks) but they just wanted her to stay the night just to make sure nothing else pops up in the middle of the night.

Jared offered to stay the night with her. He cleaned the house in between his work schedule today while I was at the hospital with Claire. What an wonderful husband I have. And Benson. What a trooper. He puts up with a of stuff I'm sure he'd rather not deal with. When we dropped Jared and Claire off at the hospital this afternoon the first thing he said was that he wanted to write Claire a letter and tell her how sorry he was that she had to sleep at the hospital tonight.

We're expecting it to be an uneventful night for all.

Claire thinks of those people in the blue scrubs as the ones who make her hurt, cry, or just plain BUG her! I like to think of them as the ones who save her life every day. ((But every once in a while I concur with Claire's thinking too.))