the adlards

There’s no tea quite as good as hospital tea. When the Sister came in at 5am yesterday I was sleeping on my camp mat on the floor of Sophie’s room (she had the candour to laugh once her eyes had adjusted to the dark). If you need to wake up in that situation there’s not a better way to do it.

After the manic sedation-related behaviour of Thursday evening, Friday was relatively calm. Sophie was badly affected by the sedative all day on Friday. On Thursday she was happily doing all her puzzles, on Friday she could just manage the big four-piece ones. She also couldn’t walk, which is perhaps the better measure of sedation, and was very sad and weepy. It’s very difficult seeing your little girl struggling like that. She’s slept for at least half of the last 24 hours and is much better now.

The blood for testing was supposed to be drawn between the MRI and wiring up on Thursday, but because that dragged on pretty late there were no pathology drivers available when the time came, so bloods were to be done on Friday while Sophie was sedated for removal of the electrodes. Probably unsurprisingly, there was some missing co-ordination and we wound up having to take 12 vials of blood for testing while Sophie was wide awake. Being held down by her Mum & Dad. Nice.

Blood samples have gone to labs at Constantiaberg, Palotti, Red Cross Childrens Hospital and some overseas. Results should trickle in over the next two weeks or so.

The humour highlight of our visit was without question the electrode removal … so blood had been taken and everyone (everyone who wasn’t staff) was a little shaken, when in comes a nurse sent to remove the electrodes from Sophie’s scalp. She sort of hovers over Sophie for a few seconds, then says, “I don’t think I’ll just pull them off, it looks like it might hurt.”
So help me.
It’s true.
To her eternal credit, while my jaw was still on the floor, MGW calmly looked at her and said, “Ummm, usually they put something on them first to dissolve the glue.” After a brief period of consultation, the nurse reappeared with gloves, swabs and acetone. She had a stab and concluded that we’d need to sedate. I had her leave her tools in the room.

We didn’t want Sophie sedated again just to remove the electrodes so Michelle & I did it ourselves. Just like last time. The trick is to do the minimum possible to remove the electrodes. This takes some time. Acetone stinks, is freezing on the skin because it evaporates before you have a chance to actually do anything with it, is toxic and can bring on seizures, and doesn’t actually do the job very well. When the electrodes are off, the glue on Sophie’s scalp is still very much in place. It’ll take a month to get the 20-odd blobs off and out of her hair bit by bit.

It is very good to have her home and see her smiling again today (and doing puzzles). And eating sausage.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 3:23 pm by james and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.