So, our overnight hospital stay turned into a week-long stay! We were admitted Monday, and hopefully we will go home this coming Monday or Tuesday. Charlie has e. coli positive pyelonephritis. That means that he has a urinary tract infection that's assumed to have moved to his kidneys, and his urine culture grew e. coli. This particular strain of e. coli makes the infectious diseases doctors swoon, according to one of Charlie's docs! It's a resistant strain, so the antibiotics Charlie was on initially didn't work. He's now on other IV antibiotics that seem to be working. Charlie had a fever up until yesterday. We've finally made it 24 hours fever-free! I think the plan is to switch him over to the oral antibiotics and make sure he stays fever-free, and then he will be released. That's assuming that he starts eating much better before we go, though. Right now he's only taking about 50% of what he needs orally. He was switched over to Boost, which has more calories than Pediasure and Nutren, so he can drink less but still get the calories and protein that he needs. However, he still won't get enough fluids in if he's not drinking enough, so he may need an NG tube. His fluid balance is important, because he needs enough to stay hydrated, but not too much because he has congestive heart failure, which means fluid builds up in his lungs. He's on Lasix to prevent this fluid uild up, but we can't give him more fluid than the Lasix can handle. We'll see if he perks up enough this weekend to take all of his feeds orally, otherwise he may need an NG tube. His cardiologist thinks a g-tube may be in his future, but I think once he gets a little stronger, he'll start eating a lot more. He seems better today, so hopefully we'll know soon what direction we're going to take.
Charlie's cardiologist compared Charlie to a Russian nesting doll - he's full of surprises! He has a list of diagnoses longer than he is! He's an alphabet soup: DS, PDA, VSD, PH, FTT, and suspected OSA and VUR. Poor kid. While we've been here, he's been seen or followed by cardiology, nephrology, infectious diseases, nutrition, the International Adoption Clinic, and genetics. May is already full of appointments for Charlie! We'll bust through this all and have a great summer showing Charlie what it means to be in a family and have fun!
I just wanted to say I think it's interesting that Charlie has ESBL e-coli because one of my daughters who we adopted from Ukraine this past October also has the same drug-resistant e-coli and the infectious disease doctors at the children's hospital were shocked since it's so very uncommon here in the USA. It took 4 weeks of IV antibiotics to fully rid Bethany of her infection (hers went to full-blown sepsis from the pyelonephritis) ~ we treated for 2 weeks, thought the infection was gone & Bethany got discharged from the hospital, but she was back in 16 days later for another 2 weeks of IV antibiotics when the same e-coli showed up again. Our docs think she must have been given a ton of antibiotics in the orphanage in order to have such resistant bacteria colonized in her body.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, I hope Charlie recovers well, gets healthy & stays that way! :)