Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Broke her J-Tube and First bout of pneumonia

Mikki, Ava's home health nurse left today around 6pm. Literally 5 minutes after she left the tip of Ava's 'J' tube (feeding tube) broke off in my hand. UNBELIEVABLE! I needed to take her to the hospital to have it replaced under x-ray, but couldn't transport her by myself! I called everyone I could think of and finally called Michelle, a friend from childhood that lived down the street, and she was nice enough to drop her plans for the evening and take us to Children's. I was feeling pretty low at this point, "We were JUST there," I thought. On the way there I noticed her pulse was in the 180's and 190's but since she has a history of fast heart rate I chalked it off to being irritated, hungry, etc. The hospital got us in and out in about 30 minutes, and on the way home Michelle kept asking me, "Are you sure she's ok?" (She's a nurse, so was thinking the fast pulse and fast breathing was suspicious of pneumonia) but I assured her "It was nothing, it's just Ava." Sure enough, by the next afternoon, she spiked a fever of 104.8 and was diagnosed with pneumonia. We arrived in the ER with her doing pretty good really. Fever was under control, pulse was in the 150-160's, oxygen was in the low 90's. Was I failed to recognize were the signs of respiratory distress. The nurse that was checking us in kept looking suspiciously at her pulse-ox and noticed it had dropped from 90 to 79 with the nasal canula ON. So she very calmly asked us to follow her and directed us into a critical care room. Next thing I knew there were about 6-7 Dr's around her and she looked very pale and was listless. It came on so fast it was incredible. She spent a total of 3 day in the hospital this time.           

Monday, May 19, 2008

Found blood all over her blankets - scared me to death

Woke up at 6:00am to give Ava her meds and looked in on her before heading to the kitchen. I had to take a second look. Her face was covered with this gooey brownish looking stuff and it was all up in her hair and caked around her lips. Then I saw even more around her head on her blankets. My heart started beating really fast and I yelled for Kenny. He took one look at her and said, "It's blood." We called my Dad to come watch Aohdan, and headed to the ER. This was out first trip back since going home and I cried all the way there. At the ER they informed us that this is a common occurence with kids that have feeding tubes, it is called *Gastritis* and basically they said it happens when the tube site gets irritated and bleeds from the inside, then the child throws up the blood. Sorry for the graphic description:)