Life in progress

Tag Archives: Hospital


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Quantifying Stress

Stress is something everyone feels, if not on occasion, then constantly. Though we’re all different, and there are certain things or combinations of things in our lives which cause it, it has approximately the same effect on us all.

It raises our blood pressure, causes in us either adrenaline or exhaustion, usually one on the heels of the other. It does wondrous things to our bodies – gives us headaches, makes our skin break out in rashes and can give us pain where we didn’t think it was possible to have it.

But. There’s always a but. Stress is invisible. It can’t be counted; it can only be felt. It can only be seen by the ripping out of one’s hair and the stomping about of one’s feet, or the squealing of one’s wheels on dry pavement. Explaining it is near impossible to someone who doesn’t understand how much we’re under.

There are scales for pain: you can see them hanging on hospital walls. But what if there was such a thing as a stress scale? How would it look?

On a scale from one to ten, for myself, one would show a picture of me banging my shin against the foot of my spare bed, that has been out to get me since I inherited said bed with the house I’m living in.

Three would be the bed plus dropping everything I touch in the space of fifteen minutes. I have days like that.

Five might be getting in the car and turning the key to a click instead of the firing of pistons when I have an appointment to get to.

Seven to eight is being interrupted ten minutes after I sit down to write, and I just have my head in whatever I’m trying to concentrate on… eight being the fifth time in as many minutes.

But ten? Ten is having my son tell me he’s tired and putting my ear to his chest to find that his heart is in arrhythmia, going 90 beats per minute for a few beats, and then down to 30 for a few and back again. Adds up to a decent 60bpm, but there’s still the question, do I take him to the hospital or not? I’m alone with two kids, neither of whom can be left alone. This is where my stress level was two nights ago.

And so I thought, maybe I should make up a scale for my family so they know when not to push my buttons. Because no one wants to get in the line of fire when I’m reaching five, let alone ten.

What do you think – not for me, but for yourself? Might a stress scale lessen the number of stress-induced conflicts in your home? Something to consider, I think.


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JusJoJan 18 – Dodged a Bullet

It’s both a blessing and a curse having a child who enjoys going to the hospital. Obviously it’s nice not to have to fight with Alex every time he gets sick – he gets sick a lot. He enjoys the attention he gets there; he loves to charm nurses and doctors alike, and to him, it’s an adventure. The downside is, he’ll pretend to be sicker than he is and then beg me to take him to see a doctor. And what better way, at this time of year, to actually catch something nasty, than sitting for hours in an emergency waiting room?

Last night he almost managed to convince me that he’d aspirated food into his lungs again. He complained of pain in his chest, that he was feverish, (he wasn’t) and he was just plain miserable, the same as he was on Christmas Eve. I suspected he might have been exhibiting symptoms from the flu shot he received the day before yesterday, so I decided to call Telehealth Ontario, a service we have here so that we can talk to a nurse, so see if our symptoms are worth taking to the emergency room.

The nurse asked me all the protocol questions before she would talk to me about Alex – is he responsive, is he in pain etc etc. I answered as honestly as I could. Yes, he was complaining of chest pain, yes he was turning blue around his lips (I explained he always does whenever he’s upset – it’s due to his heart condition) but no, he doesn’t have a fever. Finally she asked me a question that was relevant. When did he last eat? It was three hours ago. She told me that if he’d aspirated, the symptoms of that would have shown up earlier.

So while I was relieved, she was telling me to call 911 and have an ambulance take him to the hospital because of his blueness and his chest pain.

Why didn’t I? It was the sparkle in his eye that told me all he really wanted to do was visit his beloved nurses. Today there’s not a thing wrong with him.


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EDDD 25 – Trust Your Instincts

‘Twas the night before Christmas
And all ’round the kitchen
There was choking and coughing
My son, he was bitchin’

…that his head ached, he was dizzy, tired, and everything hurt. It was about half an hour after dinner. Within the next fifteen minutes he was asleep on the couch and his breathing was fast and shallow.

I started looking to the internet for solutions as to what could be wrong. All day he’d been active, happy, and looking forward to opening his presents. On a hunch I looked up ‘aspiration.’ Bingo. I checked his temp. He was burning up.

Fifteen minutes later we were at the hospital. By midnight he’d had an x-ray – they found a piece of food lodged in his right lung. It took one hour for him to go from fine to having aspiration pneumonia. He’s at home now, happily playing with his new Wii U, on antibiotics.

I’ve said it so many times and I’ll say it again. A mother knows her child much better than any doctor can. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a position where I’ve had to tell a doctor flat out that he or she was wrong. I’ve demanded a second opinion from a pediatrician more than once.

This wasn’t the case last night, however this post is to say that if you are a mother, always trust your instincts over a doctor’s opinion.

Had I not trusted my instincts, the scenario right now could have been much much worse. Apparently the chances of survival for this sort of thing depends on early detection.

A Christmas miracle indeed. Merry Christmas everyone!

Blog post of December 25th, in honour of Every Damn Day December. Check it out!


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Is It Just Me?

Is it just me or does it seem like this is the worst time of year for colds? Every year at Christmas time, someone in my family gets sick. It’s awful when it’s me, because I’m the one everyone counts on to do all the shopping, the wrapping, and the cooking, on top of everything else. This year (knock on wood) it’s not me though. It’s Alex, my little guy.

If it’s just a cold, I’ll be able to keep him home. It’ll be rough, with sleepless nights and plenty of whining, but we’ll make it. If it’s the flu, off to the hospital we’ll go for a nice leisurely stay (for him, he loves the hospital) and for me it’ll be running back and forth for this and that, because they don’t have the equipment to feed him, they can’t get the formula he drinks, and they can’t make up his medicine without the recipe. They also don’t have his size in diapers. Oh, and of course they don’t have sign language interpreters, and none of the nurses, nor any of the doctors (so far) know American Sign Language. It’s loads of fun for Alex – he laughs at them when they try to sign to him – unless he’s very sick, and then I receive phone calls in the middle of the night asking for translations.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? I certainly hope so. Wish us luck!


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My missing week

It all started Tuesday morning at 2:41am. I was woken from my sleep by one sick little boy. You have to understand that when this kid gets sick, he really gets sick. Stomach flu has, up until now, always landed him in the hospital because of his heart condition; his heart doesn’t do well with dehydration. So after being up since above mentioned 2:41 I took him to the hospital to get him set up on an IV before his condition became critical. Then I learned something new.

They don’t automatically hook up the IV anymore. First they try a very strong anti-nausea medication. So we did that, and after they were sure he would at least be able to handle electrolytes he was sent home.  Five hours later he wasn’t tolerating anything anymore, so back to the hospital. I’ve seen this kid when he’s been in distress, and believe me, I don’t want to go there again. It’s no fun seeing your 12 year old in cardiac arrest.

8:30pm we arrived in emergency again. 3:46am we were called into a room… still no real signs of distress from my little guy but he looked pretty dry having kept down the equivalent of two glasses of water all day – it was Wednesday by then. So we got into a room and he layed down on the bed and went to sleep. I managed to nod off for about 45 minutes sitting up in a chair. Then the doctor finally came in, woke me up, and demanded answers none of which I could remember right away, so she was pissed off. She informed me that they would give him some more of this wonder drug and try to feed him a half hour later, meanwhile they would send him for an x-ray because of his history of bowel obstructions. That was fine. We got back from that and I nodded off again, sitting up – 45 minutes later (an hour and a half after he’d had the drug) two nurses came in with a needle saying the doctor had ordered blood work on him.

“I thought you were going to try to give him water!” I exclaimed, tired beyond belief by this time.

“Nope,” they said. “Just blood work.”

They asked me to hold him still for them while he screamed his poor bloody head off but I was too much of a wreck. I felt sick. So they went about it without me. When I did turn to help they had poked him, unsuccessfully, and given up. Oh, did I forget to mention the discussion they’d had between them where the least experienced of them had offered to let the more senior one try and the more senior said no, you try it. … even though I told them it was difficult to find a vein on him when he WASN’T dehydrated? Yeah, that happened.

Then they left. Without saying a word to me, they walked out. I managed to snag one of them about half an hour later and I asked her what was happening.

“What’s happening with what?” she asked.

“With the blood work!” I said, shaking my head.

“Oh, he struggles too much and we don’t have enough people to hold him,” she said, and rushed away. This was at 6:50am.

I stood up after that, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone who would actually tell me what was going on. At 8:30am the doctor finally came in. She took one look at Alex, who by this time was busying himself getting packed up to go, and one look at me, and declared I looked worse than he did.  Well yeah, after 4 hours of sleep over the course of 48, what would you expect? I was total mush.

I had everything explained to me, finally. His x-ray didn’t look normal so she told the nurse to let me know they were holding his water and giving him blood work instead… but the nurse didn’t. Had they done that I would have been able to tell them he looked better and saved him from being poked unnecessarily. Apparently the doctor had also requested a bed for me so I could get some sleep… Lovely.

So we were sent home.

Then I got sick.

I completely lost Thursday to sleep and, well, bed. There was NO WAY I was going back to the damned hospital.

So here I am. Both of us are better and almost back to normal. So what did I miss?