Hospital Admittance

Yesterday morning (4:30am), I woke to get ready for the gym, but I felt Kaitlyn and she was burning up. Took her temp with a "Tempa-DOT" thermometer and it only goes to 40.4 degrees Celsius, which is 104.72 degrees Fahrenheit and it was full of blue dots, so her fever could have been even higher, I don't know. So, Mike & I quickly ran around the house and packed our bags for the hospital because we knew she would be admitted for sure. Kaitlyn's mood was pretty good. She was wide awake and chatting up a storm, but she complained of leg pain. So, we had to carry her to the car once we were ready to leave. But, we have done this enough times now that she knows what comes next when she has a fever. Most of the time, she even helps is to pack her things.

6am - checked Kaitlyn into the ER, they took her weight, had her port accessed almost immediately & blood was drawn for CBC's and blood cultures, which is all pretty standard at this point.

6:30am - Once her blood was drawn, they brought her some Tylenol for the fever.

6:45am - They sent Katie for a chest X-ray. They wanted to rule out any respiratory problems.

7:30am - First antibiotic, Vancomycin, was administered. This took an hour to go in through her port. At this point, they informed us that Kaitlyn was most definitely being admitted. I also asked the doctor how often she should be receiving her antibiotics and he said, "Every 6 to 8 hours".

8:30am - Second antibiotic, Aztreonam, was administered, this also took an hour.

The nurse mentioned to us that there were currently no rooms available and that we would have to wait until they made some discharges on the floor before they could get us into a room, but that we would probably be in a room by 11am. I immediately looked at Mike and said, "No, way. The earliest we have ever been discharged from the hospital was early afternoon. We won't be in a room until 3, the earliest." With that, we settled in for the long haul.

1pm - Still in the ER for lunch. Kaitlyn has gotten progressively more tired and lethargic at this point, but I think she was mostly bored. We asked her repeatedly how she was feeling and every time, she replied, "Good".

2pm - 6 & 1/2 hours after her first antibiotic was administered, I asked the nurse when Kaitlyn would be receiving her next dose of antibiotic. She responded, "The doctor only wrote for one dose in the ER." I replied, "Yes, I am sure that was with the assumption that we would have been in a room by now." She then offered to "look into it", but we did not see her again until we were being moved to the floor. At the very least, Kaitlyn should have received another dose of Tylenol as her fever was again on the rise.

3:30pm - Still in the ER. Kaitlyn finally fell asleep for a little nap.

We spoke to the infectious disease team who mentioned seeing small spots of possible pneumonia in her chest x-rays. They wanted to watch her closely and retake the chest X-ray today to determine if it is getting better or worse.

4pm - Finally in a room on the 5th floor.

The nurse on the floor immediately asked us when her last dose of Tylenol was administered because she was burning up. At this point, I was quite annoyed to learn that while in the ER, Kaitlyn had missed 2 doses of Tylenol (which she should have gotten every 4 hours), 1 dose of Vancomycin and 1 dose of Aztreonam (both of which should have been administered at the 8 hour mark) because the doctor had only written for "one dose in the ER".

By the time she had gotten her second dose of Tylenol, it was 5pm (10 & 1/2 hours after the first dose). And she had to wait until 7:30pm for her second round of antibiotics (12 hours after the first dose).

The ER also dropped the ball on doing a "viral swab" on Kaitlyn to test her for typical flu viruses, but also SWINE flu. The nurses on the floor were stunned that they hadn't done that in the ER and so they had to get that done before Katie could go to bed. They didn't get around to that until 9pm.

All in all, it was a really bad day in the ER.