The Stocking Story: CHOC ER

Today marks exactly one week from Ryder's palate surgery. And unfortunately, we "celebrated" by returning to the one place we didn't want to visit - CHOC. But this time it was CHOC ER. Ryder's fever was almost 103 this morning and he was inconsolable when he woke up. We called his plastic surgeon and requested to see him first thing this morning. We had an appointment at 11:30am but couldn't wait that long so Dr. Prutsok got us in as his first appointment at 8am. Dr. Prutsok examined Ryder's repair and said both his palate and cheek graft look normal. Good news - hooray! Bad news - he was concerned with Ryder's consistent fever over the past 5 days and sent us over to CHOC ER. We checked in (along with 10,000 other people - why are ER rooms ALWAYS packed?!) and they examined Ryder up and down. The examination included: scraping the wax from his ears (checking for infection), running a blood panel, taking a urine sample (which was collected via cathater up his pee-pee), chest x-rays, blood pressure, temperature etc,, and this was all before an IV was even started. Thankfully most of the tests came back normal with the exception of Ryder's urine sample. Ryder's WBC (white blood count) was a bit high and doctor said it could be signs of a virus. We wouldn't know for sure until a urine culture was conducted; which would take 36-48 hours. So given all of the "normal" test results, they discharged us (6 hours later) and will call us with results from the urine culture in a couple of days. Thankfully, they rehydrated Ryder with an IV and were able to successfully give him a cup of apple juice! Yay for progress on drinking liquids! Let's pray it continues. Over the next few days we need to closely monitor Ryder's fevers and if he still has a fever in 3 days we need to take him back to ER. When we left ER his temperature was already shooting back up to 102.5 but doctor said to continue managing with Motrin/Tylenol. Needless to say we stopped by Costco on the way home and stocked up on meds.