Monday, February 01, 2010

Wishful thinking

Nope we did not go home on Saturday. We are still in the hospital hopefully we will go home today.

On Saturday after Amaey got his Peg at noon, he was fine. He was in pain because Peg are 2 injections given at the same time on each thigh. Amaey says it hurts a lot. Apurva and I exchanged our shifts and around 6pm Amaey started complaining of eye pain. Severe headache and eye pain. When I touched his forehead to press it I realized he had temperature as well. Amaey's tolerance for pain is pretty high, when you see him crying out of pain you know it is severe. They gave him tylenol and his last dose of Benadryl. I was hoping that would help him. But he was really restless. Finally after an hour of cold water compress and sheer tiredness he fell asleep. The nurse checked his temp and it as still high 39.5. After 4 hours on the mark his temp that had gone down to 38.6 was back up to 39.5. This carried on throughout the evening and night. At midnight his eye pain was severe again and they suggested morphine. I could not consider morphine... it felt too much. I asked for a resident consul and she assured me that morphine dose for kids was not severe. It would help with the pain though.

At 4am he was tossing and turning and exhausted with pain and a sleepless body. I made him sleep with me hoping that would help but finally at 5am I asked for morphine. His pain was unbearable. Finally, the two of us slept soundly until 8:30am when the nurse had to take his vitals. He looked much better I could see that he wasn't clenching as much. However, he needed tylenol again at 9am and then when the doctors came in for their rounds at noon, Amaey had a major meltdown. His intense pain was back. The doctors needed eye drops in his eyes and they were stinging him. He started getting upset with me. I finally had to call the doctor back in the room and have her give Amaey a talk. She was really nice. She stayed until I administered the drops and finally prescribed morphine one more time. She could see that the pain was very high and she really needed him to relax and rest.

The reason I was giving him the eye drops was a decision Apurva and I had made. Apparently Cyterabine can give a form of conjunctivitis thus they put eye-drops for the 2 days of administering the chemo. So either, Amaey wipes his eyes before the drops really go in his eye or the drops do not always go in his eye, whatever the reason, Amaey ended up with the eye pain. So we came up with a plan to administer the drops ourselves just to have more control over the situation.

When I left the hospital at 1pm he was fever free and the morphine had kicked in so I could see that he was more relaxed. Apurva said that the last time they had to give him tylenol was Sunday around 5pm and he was fever free the entire night. He slept well and when I cam in this morning he had a big smile on his face. He is himself today so i dropped him off to school upstairs. If his counts are stable they will definitely let us go home today.

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