Saturday, July 16, 2022

Thomas Inpatient with a GI Bug

Copied from Facebook Saturday July 16

Thanks for your prayers! Thomas is inpatient at Levine’s with mesenteric adenitis, which means the lymph nodes along his intestines are very swollen. This is usually caused by a virus and Tom’s surgeon thinks this was what one other sibling had last week that caused that child only 24 hours of fever and malaise. In Thomas, he had fever and refusal to eat for many days, increasing difficulty tolerating his overnight tube feeding, then on Friday began vomiting every 15 minutes all day. His surgeon asked me to bring Thomas to the Emergency Drpartment to rule out bowel obstruction, sepsis, and meningitis (the Big Three he will always be vulnerable to), and CT scan showed the lymph nodes. 

Treatment is Thorazine to stop vomiting (the only anti-emetic Thomas now responds to), aggressive hydration, IV antibiotics, and NSAIDs to bring down inflammation. 

Likely we will stay a second overnight: Thomas needs another dose of IV antibiotics tonight, and he needs to be no longer vomiting even without anti-emetics, and to be tolerating his tube feeds. The doctors says he can go home even if he is not eating by mouth because he anticipates that being the last thing to “come back.”

This was Thomas’s first time catching a GI bug post-gastrectomy and we parents and the team had wondered how it would affect him in general. His surgeon has always suspected that GI bugs will be really hard on Thomas and this one certainly is. There are some kids I know who need hospital-level support to get through respiratory bugs or GI bugs which the rest of us manage on our own, so it is possible Thomas will be one of those kids when it comes to GI bugs. 

Chris and John are gone at Fraternus camp out of state, and I told Chris not to come back unless this is Scary Serious, which it is not. Mary (13) is a fantastic babysitter, neighbors fed our kids, and a dear friend is covering the overnights at my house. Our family is blessed and grateful.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17890-mesenteric-lymphadenitis?fbclid=IwAR0_hS948yWm9bQq9OPvlSvg5_Z-Gl2fceKtAhNp7GDyWyd621w5TYDemxM





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