Pain by numbers

We almost got to call it a good day.  At least it was a good night.  Annie needs to be given prednisone every eight hours and that works out to a does at 10:30-11:00 at night, with food.  We woke her for that then all slept until the morning - yeah!  

Her discharge orders allowed her to resume school but we wanted to take it slowly.  However Annie's love for her school and her friends is the very thing that keeps her going.  Thus by 9:30 she had cleared every hurdle we gave her and we could think of no reason to keep her home any longer.  She didn't call during the day and came home and started homework.  Then came 5:30 p.m.  The acute head pain from Saturday resumed with a vengeance.  I'm beginning to think there is a body cycle at work here as I know temperatures spike at this time of day (so maybe it wasn't the sweet potato fries...).  Any how we have a professional grade blood pressure cuff and that registered 160/100 and then 152/96.  We called the hospital and they said to get her immediately to the local ER.

Three hours and forty five minutes later they are still there.  ER's are never fast or straight forward.  It's even harder when you are trying to coordinate with another hospital and the attending doctor doesn't have first hand knowledge of your case.  It's even harder when your ER doctor has never heard of ATG (aplastic anemia is very rare) and starts going down the wrong path but you are just a parent.  It's even harder when everyone is tired and hungry and your child is giving her pain an 8 and her face and sounds go with a 10. After many phone calls, helpful friends, assertiveness and the grace of God we got the necessary medicine and avoided the unnecessary procedures.  The blood pressure began to go down and they are good to come home on the ER end but need to reach the doctor on the other end.  Bureaucracy.

I'm working on making sure things go more smoothly should this happen again.  Hopefully we can have a prescription for the blood pressure lowering medicine at home.

Katherine is in her school production of Into the Woods but I'm hoping that tomorrow I'll be able to report that we're out of the woods!