First hospital stay of the year

Anna has been really quite well since our long stay in hospital before Christmas. She’s only had one fracture (left wrist) and been generally infection free.

However, this week she obviously wasn’t feeling quite so good. She was nauseous a lot of the time and her blood red blood cell count was low on Wednesday. I had planned to take her in on Friday morning for a blood transfusion.

However, on Thursday morning her temperature spiked up to nearly 39 degrees so she didn’t go to school. Instead we headed into edinburgh sick kids where she was admitted for further investigations. She’s had her blood taken for cultures and viral and bacterials swabs taken from mouth and nose.

She was due at the orthopaedic outpatient clinic this morning anyway, to get her current cast removed, so we headed down there, had the cast removed, and her wrist X-rayed to check if there had been a fracture (if it was fractured then we can see the healing process of the bone).

Anna also had her blood transfusion this morning and has had more blood tests taken to check all levels. Yesterday as well as being quite anaemic, her platelets were low and her liver function tests (done as a matter of routine with Anna now) were in the higher end of normal. Not a concern yet but the trend in the past has been for them to slowly creep up out of the normal range.

Things were looking much better today. Her temperature has gone back to normal after the initial spike and she is just seems much better this afternoon. She’s had a steady stream of toys/arts and crafts from the play therapist and a session with the music therapist. We spent so much time on Ward 2 over the last two years that most of the staff know Anna really well – and she knows them too. It makes it much easier.

The doctors have said that if it were any other child they would probably have sent them home this morning with oral antibiotics. But Anna’s history of erratic and worrying medical events means that they want to keep her just a bit longer. There was talk of maybe going home over the weekend though… fingers crossed.…

Nathan has been here for the afternoon, which has been really nice for them both as often they can go several days without seeing each other, if not longer, when Anna is in hospital.

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