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?