To The Hospital We May Go...AGAIN.

So Connor is still feeling under the weather. He's still running a fever, still having GI issues, still has no appetite, still is irritable and tired. While Tylenol brings his fever down to a really low grade one or to normal, as soon as it wears off it starts slowly climbing again. I went ahead and paged our doc today since we hadn't heard back from the hospital, and he consulted with a few other doctors there and called us back. Here's what we've been told so far:

• Typically with a virus, a fever should only last 3-5 days. Since Connor has been running a low-grade fever since April 2nd, this is too long to be just one virus, though it is possible that he had a couple of viruses back to back. He'd also spiked that really high fever on March 27th that we ended up in the hospital for, but there were a couple of days in between where Connor didn't seem to be running a fever, so that may not be related. Of course, he was also on some pretty massive doses of Tylenol, too, so who knows.

• Connor has had GI issues since his surgery on the 23rd. That's way too long to be having those issues without a cause other than a virus. They've slowly gotten worse over the last week or so too, not in frequency, but in, um...consistency. (Ew. Sorry.) If it was an issue with his new diet, we probably wouldn't be seeing that change, nor should he be running a fever.

• Since he actually had an incision made to put the g-tube in and it wasn't a "blind" insertion, then it's not likely the issue is something like the surgeon accidentally causing a perforated intestine-- an extremely dangerous situation where there is a cut in the intestine wall that causes leakage into the body cavity. Connor's incision site on the outside looks good, too-- no signs of infection that Jer and I can see, though the doc will take a look at it. However, since he's been running a fever for this long, it very well could be due to an infection somewhere in the g-tube site, even if it's not showing up on the surface of the skin.

Since Connor's condition seems to be pretty stable right now, they thought it would probably be okay to wait until the morning to bring him in, as long as we were comfortable with that. If at some point during the night he starts getting dehydrated due to the GI issues, his fever spikes really high, we can't wake him up, or his "state of awareness" changes (he doesn't know who we are, isn't aware of surroundings, et cetera) then we'll bring him into the ER. We'll bring him in first thing tomorrow and the doctors will take a good look at him and figure out whether or not they want to admit him, run a bunch of cultures if they can determine the cause of his issues, and monitor him to make sure his electrolytes aren't becoming unbalanced and he's not ending up dehydrated. We're less than five minutes from the hospital, so we're okay with waiting until tomorrow morning to go in.

Long story short, there's a good chance we'll end up admitted back into the hospital tomorrow, and we may be there for a while. I'll keep you all posted as to what's going on with us.

~Jess