At 9:30 Thursday morning I got the call to tell me she had passed out after having what looked like a seizure. Problem was that she was on a school field trip about an hour away. This came after about a month of her battling with her health... so as you can imagine that hour of driving felt like a life time and filled with great anxiety of which a huge contributing stressor has to do with the fact that we had already spent so much on doctors and medicine in the last month and we have no medical aid.
I took her back to the doctor we had visited the day before who had prescribed medicine for a sinus infection and sent her home to recover. The doctor did a lot of prodding, questioning, frowning... then made her statement that she needed to be referred. However not just to a specialist but to hospital.
Off we went to hospital to find out at reception that the specialist with the doctor’s note wanted to put her in ICU. Prodding, questioning, and frowning... was now accompanied by drawing blood and hooking the poor thing to monitors and drips AND this is the first time I was asked to leave the space, to please go stand outside the ICU and that I would be called when they need me...
Doctor then called me to say, they are going to do an MRI and take it from there... after all the blood tests come back... MRI clear and next they did and EEG... EEG clear and then they sent us to a normal ward... yesterday afternoon. AND I waited and waited and waited for someone to please inform me about what was going on...
Finally, at four the specialist doctor appeared who told me that there is an infection, but we do not know where... it was not a seizure but a convulsion and to take her home, keep her on the antibiotics and bring her back to his rooms in 3 weeks. We are now only waiting for blood tests to come back for auto-immune disorder.
However, what I wanted to talk about is... what shock it is to have a 14 year old in the system. It only really dawned on me when I got home that I had pretty much had been left out of the 'loop' during my child's entire stay. The reality is she is 14 now and has the right to speak for herself, answer all the questions about her health, her behaviour (she was overwhelmed about the things they asked her...) and expected to know her medical history!
After the doctors and staff had done her intake interview and I was allowed to be with her... she told me quite emotionally how she missed being a child, wanted to go to a paediatric ward and more than that wanted to go home... I think it was a shock for her too having to be an adult in the system.
She was exposed to horrible things in ICU and then in the ward she was moved to because she in not protected from the realities of life because in the system she is an adult
We were both so happy when we were told she can go home. A still sick teenager put herself to bed after a bath and... now I wait for her to wake up.
Comments
Post a Comment