In Which Connor Watches Entirely Too Much Hospital Television

Well guess where I spent a good portion of my day?

I'll give you a hint: they had cable television and ice chips.

Yes, I spent a glorious eight or so hours in the emergency room with Connor today, watching some show called The Mysteries of Alfred Hedgehog and wishing I was pretty much anywhere else.  The little guy had his first seizure at six in the morning, and proceeded to have one pretty much every hour on the hour until around 9:00am, which is when I used our diastat.  He actually had his fourth seizure while I was on the phone with the nurse from neurology, which was fun.

Our instructions from the neurologist as far as the seizures were initially pretty much the same-- wait it out and get his levels checked on Monday.  However the nurse was pretty concerned about the choking incident after the seizure in the van Connor had yesterday, and she asked us to go in to our pediatrician's today and get him checked out for aspiration pneumonia, just in case.  The neurologist was wondering if the sudden upturn in seizures might partly be because he was getting sick. 

So I called the pediatrician's office and they were completely unable to fit him in today, and told me to take him to-- you guessed it-- the emergency room.  We got there about 9:30 and were promptly shown back to a room.  There's one advantage to having a kid with Connor's kind of complex medical history; we don't do a whole lot of waiting and we completely bypass the screening process and the triage nurse.  Also we get a private room.  With cable television.

I got Connor settled in, turned on the TV for him (which delighted him to no end as he knows that hospital stays are the only time he's allowed to watch as much television as his little heart desires) and started the fun process of filling the doctor in on Connor's latest escapades.  About that time our neurologist called back again, and asked us to get a chest x-ray done and also a set of blood levels today rather than waiting.  So the ER doc put the orders in and less than five minutes later the tech came to whisk us back to the x-ray room.

Did I mention that I really like private hospitals?

Anyway, so Connor got his first set of x-rays done, and we were positioning him for his second when he started having his fifth seizure of the day.  This is the second time Connor has had a seizure in the middle of an x-ray session, and even though this was a different hospital we managed to once again freak the tech out pretty badly, though to his credit he handled it much better than the last tech Connor pulled this on.  I don't think they have that sort of thing happen very often.  Connor seems to be kind of rough on techs.

So we were there for a few more hours while they waited for his blood test results to come back.  His lamictal results won't be in until Monday, but the valproic acid and the pancreatic and liver enzymes all came back within normal limits and there was no evidence (thank goodness) of aspiration pneumonia.  The little guy's neurologist decided that since the valproic acid didn't seem to be helping, Connor should start working down off of it.  So he dropped the little guy's dose down from 5ml to 2ml and upped his keppra dose from 6ml to 8ml.  We're going to try and keep his seizures under control with ativan until the med change is complete. 

So we were discharged around 1:30 or so in the afternoon and made it as far as the first set of double doors when Connor began his sixth seizure of the day.  I promptly turned his chair around and walked back into the waiting room, where we proceeded to completely freak out the waiting patients, get the crash cart called, etc.  Since they hadn't entered our discharge paperwork into the computer yet Connor went straight back into his bed, where the little stinker soon regained consciousness and immediately began demanding that I turn on the television.  The kid knows our hospital stay rules about television and he was bound and determined to squeeze in every second of TV time that he possibly could. 

What could I tell him?  I made the darn rule, after all. 

So after a shot of ativan and another hour and a half or so of watching Alfred the Hedgehog's crazy and rather implausible deducting abilities we tried leaving for a second time and thankfully managed to make it out the door and home.  I stopped at the store first, because after a day like this one I planned on surviving until Jeremy got home and then locking myself in the bathroom for a couple of hours to spend some quality time lounging in a scented tub with a book and a very large piece of chocolate sour cream cake, and my home was sadly lacking in both bath salts and chocolate sour cream cake, which had to be remedied immediately.  Oh, and also we needed diapers, which was my excuse to buy everything else early and get an early start on the cake before Jer got home. 

Connor better have a better time tomorrow, because I don't think my waistline can take too many more days like today.

So we have instructions to bring him back in if the ativan isn't keeping the seizures under control: a scenario which is unfortunately not all that unlikely.  We'll be sticking close to home for most of the weekend just in case the medication change doesn't go well, because the last thing we need is for him to have more of these things on the highway. 

So yeah.  Fun times.

~Jess