Sunday, 8 July 2012

No medicine? Hospital then.

Stephs Two Girls July 08, 2012 autism, medicine, Pathological Demand Avoidance, PDA, PDA Life

OK, I'll admit it. It's ALL my fault. I jinxed it, you see. By that I mean, I broke the spell of good luck we've had. I did what I promised myself I would never do, and talked about it. Or rather, wrote, about it. See my previous blog post Poorly Child at home.

That's the trouble with blogging I've found; sometimes words just slip out unintentionally. Over the past 7 years I have been very aware of how lucky we have been with regards health. I've purposefully never said it out loud to anyone, so I don't know what possessed me to write about it. Now I've 'gone and done it', and I'm just hoping I haven't opened the floodgates....

Anyhoo, I now know what happens when your child won't take medicine. It's really not much fun.

After a week of her being poorly with high temperatures and bad cough, I took Sasha to the doctor. The lovely doctor checked her out and suggested it was a chest infection, which Sasha should have anti-biotics for. She was also a little concerned about her high heart rate and so she called A&E, booking us in for a session.

My poorly baby

We spent 5 hours there; Sasha was hot and drowsy the whole time. The doctor diagnosed tonsillitis and pneumonia.

After about 4 hours a cannula was inserted in her hand for the antibiotics to be dripped through. That makes it sounds nice and easy; believe me, it was anything but. It took all my strength to restrain Sasha as four nurses attempted this feat, and a solitary tear rolled down my cheek. The tear had nothing to do with the fact I was missing my elder daughter's last (and only) summer concert performance at infant school, but it is true that I was also sad about that.

We were thankfully allowed home at tea time, but left with instructions to return to the day ward the following day for a further injection of drugs. We did, and it was a much less pleasant experience than the previous day. Sasha was more aware of what was going on, although still quite poorly, and so did not want to be there. We had an appointment at 2pm but the drugs weren't ready and so we waited until 330pm for anything to happen. Then the nurse pushed the drugs through Sasha's hand rather than using the slower drip, and this obviously caused Sasha more discomfort.

The nurse also spent a long time trying to register Sasha's blood pressure - first with a faulty/low battery machine and then with an adult manual one. Both of these caused Sasha even more distress and, coupled with the heat on the ward, caused Sasha to almost pass out and she drowsed again. All of this while we were sitting (yes, together, Sasha on my knee) either on a kiddy size chair in the playroom, or else on a slightly larger chair in the hospital corridor. Why we weren't offered a bed, I have no idea. I was too tired to ask.

They kept us even longer though, as Sasha's heart rate was still above normal, and so they weren't allowed to sign her out. To get around this, the nurse waited until Sasha drowsed and then checked again - at which point the heart rate had obviously slowed enough to fall under the worry mark. Sadly communication then 'slipped' which meant another nurse came down the corridor and woke Sasha, checked again and found it was too high. Almost comedic, but really I was too tired to laugh. Not exactly feeling inspired by their methods so far, I decided to make a run for it after 3 hours and both Sasha and I were relieved to return home.

Over the weekend we have had a lovely community nurse visit us both days to give Sasha more drugs. She was thoughtful and understanding, and treated Sasha how she wanted to be treated. Unfortunately for some reason we only got her services for the weekend and so tomorrow we have to return to the hospital ward for another top-up; HOPEFULLY the last one and we can get the canula taken out.

I wonder if Sasha will realise in months to come that the moral of the story is that she should take her medicine off a spoon or syringe, like most other children?

I'm going to be optimistic and live in hope.

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