To enter the room: put on gown and scrub hands.To leave the room: dispose of gown at the door and wash hands.
Vitals were being checked every three hours. They are now being checked every hour.
When Spawnling turns, I instinctively get up and make sure he's not wrapped up in his lines: OSAT monitor, heart rate monitor, respiration monitor, IV line, blood pressure cuff.
When he pees I put the wet diaper in a bag and we weigh it on the scale. Input vs. output.
Who knew living in a hospital could bring out my inner OCD? Everything has exact steps to follow or a precise technique. Today I accidentally screwed up Spawn's IV on the way back from Ophthalmology and they had to put in a new one.
Mom of the year award. Right here, baby.
It's a whole different world in here, especially in isolation. It's quiet and I watch the clock. I watch Spawn. I listen to his IV machine make noise and his monitors sounding the occasional alarm. I know what every single beep means and I even know how to fix most of them, although they'd probably kick my ass if I tried.
I wake up at around 6 every morning and look for signs of improvement in the demonite. So far there hasn't been a lot: just a disappearance of one symptom as another pops up.
The diagnosis du jour is Kawasaki Disease, which is the weirdest damn thing I've ever seen. John Travolta claimed his late son had it at one point, and I once saw an episode of House M.D. where they were considering it as a possibility. It's incredibly rare; various sites claim between 10 and 19 per 100,000 people, and nearly all of them are younger than 6.
Leave it to Spawn to pick up something that is rarely seen and very hard to diagnose. He has dramatic flair, I'll give him that.
Oh, and the twist in the story? Because it's not interesting enough on its own, there's a high possibility that he also has herpes stomatitis on top of the Kawasaki.
Well of course he would do that. He's my child, isn't he?
His cocktail right now consists of Acyclovir for the herpes, IVIG and Aspirin for the Kawasaki. If the herpes culture comes back negative tomorrow we'll take him off the Acyclovir.
Blah, blah, blah. I sound like a fucking medical textbook. I've learned so much jargon and doc speak in here I'm beginning to sound rather boring. That's why I added in the swear word. I need me some cussing to prove that I'm still a jobless lowlife and not just another person with a brain.
I've been eating my feelings a lot, too. Guilt free, I might add. It feels nice to say 'today, I am going to have a chocolate bar because my son is very sick and we don't know what's wrong with him and I'm stuck in a small room with no life while I stare at his limp little body and the last thing I care to think about is how many calories are in that thank you very much'.
I've made some acquaintances in the hospital. Since I did too many drugs in my early teens and thus have a hard time remember names, I've made up my own nicknames for them: There's the Lumbar Puncture Demin Doc, who looked fantastically hot in those jeans when he told me the needed to draw fluid from my listless son's spine (being easy on the eyes when delivering potentially devastating news is kind of a superpower). We have Herpes Hero, the resident who specializes in the disease, appreciates that I do my own research and treats me like someone who can, like, think. There's 'Witty Late Night Counter Dude' who I think is the funniest, most sarcastic bastard in the whole hospital so I introduce him to everyone who stops by. And, finally, there's a resident who's name always escapes me, so I call him 'Nice Shoes Guy' for obvious reasons - he has killer taste in footwear. In the middle of one of my numerous crying jags I stopped dead, looked up and him and said 'Wow. Nice shoes.' Every time I see him now I say 'Hey! Nice Shoes Guy! What's kickin'?' and he pretends he's not incredibly annoyed with me.
Since I started writing this post I've had to get up several times to check on Spawn, question the nursing staff on his decreased heart rate, comfort spawn because he's finally waking up when the monitors go off (good sign!) and cover him up because he's getting cold without blankets instead of running a constant fever (even better sign!)
I'll update more tomorrow. The Kawasaki Disease treatment is finished. Now we wait and hope for the best.