Hospital Christmas

Isaac has so far been to hospital on Christmas Eve and Christmas day. Yesterday he had an orthoptist appointment - Paul thought I should phone to say I couldn't come as I was celebrating Christmas, but I'd probably have a long wait for another appointment. I decided to make a treat of it for J who is having a lot of disappointment about access visits with mum and now won't be seeing her over Christmas. J has not been to the hospital before and was concerned that the hospital cafe would "smell of blood"( - it is pretty poor food but not quite that bad!) anyway we went in with Paul then had breakfast at a cafe across from the hospital. We went to check with clinic reception that the clinic was on and the receptionist said that as there were no other patients we could maybe be seen immediately ie. an hour before our appointment time. We waited but found this not to be true and had to wait the full hour - still we met up with one or two friends during this time. Then the orthoptist gave Isaac the Christmas present of needing glasses to possibly straighten his squint. She said it might be an expensive trial though as she didn't know whether we'd be able to keep them on him.
We then went to the hospital canteen to wait for Paul and J was enthralled looking out the window watching the hospital rubbish be collected. Paul took us to his office where the other doctors spoke to J and she was allowed to look down a microscope at what she described as some purple dots and orangey things, then she got a Christmas chocolate from the secretary's office and on the way out saw some bags of blood in the blood bank. She was delighted by the whole visit.

Today's visit was unfortunately not quite so joyful. Isaac woke crying at 5.30am (nothing surprising about that) but his whole bed was soaking as his mickey button had come out and his feed pump had just fed the sheets rather than him.
We expected it to be the usual routine job to reinsert it, but discovered the gastrotomy hole had almost closed up and the small hole was not leaking at all which meant the button must have been out for a while. When we tried to get a new button in it just wouldn't fit and the gastrostomy started to bleed.

We phoned children's ward who luckily were very quiet with it being Christmas and they said to come straight in. Santa of course had filled stockings and left presents on the end of the beds of Noah, J and Lily who weren't yet awake and we didn't really want to wake them up and cart them off to hospital to start their Christmas day. So in end just Paul took Isaac in, with me worrying that this was going to mean a helicopter flight to Wellington or Auckland paediatric surgery unit to get the gastrostomy reopened.

Immediately after Paul left the children woke up of course! J was very pleased that Santa had answered the note she left at end of her bed.

We had a rather muted stocking opening at around 6.30 and Lily prayed for Isaac. I phoned Paul at 7.20 and he said they'd just managed to put another button in. They'd first put in a size 10 nasogastric tube, then after a while changed to a size 12 one and finally were able to change it for a size 14 button.

So by 8 O'clock they were back home - Isaac with a new toy for being in hospital on Christmas day and Paul pleased at having been spotted by some of the nurses from his ward who'd said "Eager to do a ward round today are you?"

So now we're celebrating our usual noisy Christmas with the added bonus of Isaac not needing surgery!