Thursday morning we went to Yale for Collin's MRI. He gets one every three months since he was diagnosed with brain cancer 2 1/2 years ago. He's never had complications... until now. Collin had seizures during the MRI and had to be admitted for monitoring.
He was intubated to protect his airway, sedated, and hooked up to an EEG monitor. I'm amazed how much is involved in getting those little electrodes on. It took a couple hours, and the nurse had to keep coming in to give him more meds to keep him sedated.
Thankfully, once he was loaded up with anti-seizure meds and admitted, his seizures stopped. That night Collin came out of sedation quickly before more meds could kick in and he decided he had enough of the breathing tube and started coughing it out. So the doctors and nurses came in and extubated him. The next morning he had enough of the electrodes on his head and started taking them off. Since he hadn't had any seizures overnight they decided that was okay and disconnected him and cleaned him up. I thought we would be able to go home, but then I found out he had a low grade fever overnight of 100.5. Usually nothing to worry about, but when you have a port it could be a sign of a serious infection. So we had to stay another night while they ran some tests and started him on antibiotics.
The next morning they found out that he tested positive for rhinovirus - the common cold. Nothing had come back on the blood cultures yet, but since he was acting more like himself and didn't have any more fever, they decided to discharge us that morning after he had his antibiotics. Only a couple hours later the doctors called back to say his port cultures were growing something and we had to come back in. So I packed a few bags and we went back in. They finally figured out today what specific bacteria he has and will be changing him to a better antibiotic. Since he's done with chemo and the MRI shows he's still stable, they decided to remove the port as soon as surgery has a spot available and then he'll just need one more dose of antibiotics. What started out being only a few hours has turned into almost a week before we are able to leave the hospital, but at least we won't have to worry about further complications and we won't need to follow up in the oncology clinic every month, only when he has his quarterly MRI's.
Through this all Collin has been a trooper. He's charmed all his nurses, and we've even been able to see a few familiar faces from his 6 week admission in 2010. Hopefully this will be the last complication of the year so our family can settle down and enjoy the holidays.
No comments:
Post a Comment