Third time lucky?

A very tired post walk puppy!

What can I say? After feeling so jubilant that Abi was out of hospital for the third time and home again, we've had another bumpy week with her being readmitted yet again with another infection. What a rough ride she has had - it's been a difficult month for us all.

This time round she'd had a good run of things, having been out of hospital for over a week and seemingly doing well. She went to school on Monday and I genuinely thought we had turned a corner. When she came home she was tired but happy and went to bed as normal on Monday night. By tuesdya morning she wasn't feeling great having not slept well so I made the decision to keep her off school to get some rest, By Tuesday evening she was experiencing bouts of pain and I started to get suspicious. She went to bed and then woke me around midnight to say she was having nightmares and couldn't sleep. I got into bed with  her and it was immediately apparent she was hotter than she should be. I left it until 1am and then went and got a thermometer which read 38.5 - my heart fell. I took it again about 15 mins later and it was 38.1 - better but not good enough. I could see the pain was also getting worse, albeit she didn't want to admit it. We talked about it and she was adamant that she was not going back to hospital. We agreed that if her temperature was back to normal in the morning and stayed there, with no increase in pain I wouldn't make her.  Morning finally came after very little proper sleep and I got up, walked Bertie and started work, leaving Abi to sleep. At 10:30 she came into my study looking terrible so I excused myself from the call I was on and went to the kitchen to find her in tears and clearly running a fever again. We then had a very hard conversation which ultimately ended up with me promising that if she went to hospital and then made her stay in, that I would stay with her. 

Of course this all required the hospital to accept her - I phoned them direct rather than going via the GP and, while they said she'd been out for more than a week so strictly they weren't required to see her, I think they realised that things were clearly not going to plan so it was in everyone's best interests for us to go straight back in. In the meantime the school range me and said that because Abi was running a temperature Izzy would have to go home to self isolate until we had obtained a negative Covid test for Abi - just what we needed on top of everything else!!

So off we went to the hospital, via the local Covid testing facility, where the nursing staff shunted us back into the isolation room awaiting another Covid test. At the point they took bloods and put a canular in it felt the writing was on the wall, she was clearly going to be in overnight. We then had a very depressing few hours of waiting, not least as Abi hadn't eaten anything and was starving and of course she wasn't allowed to eat until the surgical team saw her and determined whether she needed another operation. Time dragged on, we were taken from the isolation room to the ward, then almost immediately put into another isolation room, this time for fear that the underlying cause of the fever this time was a bacterial infection rather than anything resulting from the operation. I probed a bit further and it became clear the suspected cause was C Diff. On googling it (on the NHS website so as not to scare myself too much!) I could tick off all the symptoms - it looked pretty clear cut to me.  By this time Abi was hooked up to an IV drip, pain relief and antibiotics - no-one was going anywhere fast.

The trouble with going to hospital of course is that everything has to be done properly. Unfortunately having given a sample for them to test for infection, the student nurse threw it away not realising it was required for tests and so we then had to wait for another sample - so frustrating! Time was ticking on and knowing I had promised I would stay in if Abi had to I then asked if she really wanted me to stay. I always feel so torn - its so difficult to sleep in the hospital and I'm also always worried about Glenn and Izzy (as well as the dogs, guinea pigs, rats etc etc). After much tearful discussion we agreed  would go home but be back first thing to be there for the ultrasound which had been ordered to check for accumulations of fluid. I went home at 9pm, ate a quick bowl of soup and checked on the animals, only then to get a call from a very upset Abi begging me to come back. Of course there was no way I wasn't going to go so I grabbed a bag of clothes quickly and rushed back. I'm so glad I did. she had a horrible night, very little sleep and she was in so much pain. At about 1:30pm I threw my toys out and insisted they give her some morphine which they did, but I had I not been there I'm not sure it would have happened. We limped through together to the morning, finally getting a few hours of sleep between about 4 and 7am.

Thursday went well - the ultrasound showed no fluid collections and everyone appeared more convinced it was a bacterial infection, we just needed the results of the samples to come back and confirm it. These finally came back around lunchtime, and then we just (I say just, it takes ages!) needed the surgical team to review the results, prescribe the antibiotics so I could scoop her up and take her home where I know she would be much better able to recover. I did a swap with Glenn and left him to wait it out - warning him it would likely take hours. It did. They finally got away around 7pm - why oh why does it always take so long?

So this weekend has been another weekend of recovery. I worked on Friday and then we have made the most of all being together and under one roof - the simple pleasures of being in your own home and able to move as you please. We've taken Bertie and Betty for a couple of lovely walks, played cards, watched TV and revelled in being together. Abi has been so much better from the moment she stepped through the door. Being able to sleep in her own bed, be with us and her animals, get outside and eat the food she wants is a much better recipe for recovery than lying in a hospital bed hooked up to a drip. Lets just hope we don't have to run the gauntlet of another trip there for some considerable time!