Noah's Hospital Stay

Oh, wow. These last two weeks have been unreal. A few days before Easter, we noticed that Noah was having trouble walking on his right leg. Now, this is his good leg, so we were concerned - but he didn't cry or wimper or act like anything was wrong. It was just really stiff. When I picked up him, his leg was straight as a board. We just kept rubbing it and thinking that maybe it was stiff because he puts most of his weight on that leg or maybe he jumped too hard on the trampoline or something. Well, on April 7th, I was changing him and noticed that his knee was swollen and really hot. So we went straight to ER. Normally, I might have waited until Monday and just taken him into the doctor, but I was already feeling guilty that Noah'd had strep and an ear infection and I didn't know it because he never cried or acted like anything was wrong. So, we went to the ER and my parents met us up there and the doctor took X-rays of Noah's leg - and they came back fine. He thought we needed to rule out a bloodclot and sent us to Children's Hospital in Dallas............. by ambulance!! Apparantely, there's some technical thing that if are recommending a transfer from one hospital to another for further treatment you can't release them and let them travel on their own. Or something like that. Anyway, Noah had his first (and hopefully last!) ambulance ride. It was a bit embarrassing because there was absolutely no reason I couldn't just drive him, but he seemed to really enjoy it and he fell alseep halway to Dallas. The picture above is of him in the ambulance. (No, I didn't get a picture of the cute EMT driver). :-)

So, we get to the ER at Children's and they take us straight in. The Ortho Doctor comes in and says Noah needs to be sedated to have fluid drawn from his knee. And then they come in and put an IV in and then give him a popsicle for being a good boy. The problem is that we all forgot that you have to go SIX hours without food or water before you can be sedated. It was 11:30 pm by this time. So, they said we had to stay the night and he'd have his sedation at 5:30 in the morning. Well, 5:30 turned into 9:30 on Easter morning and he finally got sedated and the fluid draw came back fine. Back to the drawing board.

At this point, they scheduled an MRI of his leg and also of his brain (to see if it could be neurological) - but they don't do them on weekends. So, we got admitted to the hospital and waited around until Monday morning for the MRI. They ended up doing only the leg MRI b/c they couldn't keep him under sedation long enough to do the brain. It ended up showing that Noah had inflammation of the muscle. Well, around this same time, some abcesses popped up on the back of his leg and they lanced own of them (oh.my.gosh. I about passed out. It was like Mt. Vesuvius erupting. It was beyond gross. It was very fascinating, but sooooo nasty. Shudder). Anyway, they cultured it and it came back as MRSA Staph. Brilliant. Leave it to Noah to have a staph infection that is resistant to most antibiotics....

Okay, to be continued. Noah's teacher is on her way and I need to get Noah's medicals ready. Will write more later....

Noah's Mom

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