Emergency Room visit 12/11

Alan's continuing discomfort gave us concern this weekend - he lost a significant amount of sleep on Saturday night, was tired, irritable, and continued to contort his body around to try to get comfortable. In addition, he had almost completely discontinued walking and was starting to have trouble standing. This was not at all like our feisty monkey. He spent all of Sunday in Mommy and Daddy's bed, insisting on keeping Mommy close by while Kevin got away with a lot of mischief.

None of these signs were positive and we felt that Wednesday would be too far away to start determining what was wrong. Lucky for us Doc A was working in the hospital on Sunday night, and after some discussion with him we decided to take Alan to the ER of the Children's Hospital. As a further stroke of luck (relatively speaking), Daddy was flying in Sunday evening and was able to take Alan to the hospital while Mommy stayed home with Kevin.

Once Daddy and Alan got to the ER, we were seen pretty quickly... Alan's status as a cancer patient moved him to the top of the queue. After explaining the situation (made easier by the fact they had a lot of information about Alan from his previous stays at the hospital), they drew Alan's blood for lab work, then got an abdominal x-ray and ultrasound of his leg to check the circulation.

All the tests and scans performed showed no blockages, blood flow failures, or digestive tract obstruction. In the meantime, Alan would fade between crying periods, trying to darn near pull his right foot into his mouth, and sleeping. After much discussion with Doc A, the tentative conclusion was that he might have a pinched sciatic nerve.

Doc A started with an initial dose of Toradal to take the edge off the pain, though it didn't seem to do much good. After much discussion, Daddy decided to take him home since Alan had to be back to the Medical Center in a few hours (it was now 4 AM Monday morning) anyway for the start of week ten of post-op chemo, and that if things continued to deteriorate, we could admit him to the hospital then.