Friday 13th is not a good day to be having a
procedure in hospital. Our day started
at 8am when we were asked to arrive at
the Children’s Hospital; Ryan needed to be nil by mouth as he was having a
general anaesthetic and he was first on the list. What we hadn’t realised was that he was first
on the second list of the day and so at 12.30, a very hungry very bored Ryan
got called to theatre. Luckily he was so
hungry that he was actually quite happy to be taken to theatre and kept talking
about what he was going to eat when he woke up!
He was as good as gold being put to sleep and chatted
happily to the doctors in theatre. As he
was having stem cells collected there was also a team of nurses from the blood
bank service and must have been about 10 gowned people in the room but even
this didn’t phase him.
About an hour later we were allowed to see him in recovery,
unfortunately and for some unexplained reason, Ryan came around with a cannula
in his hand. There is no need for him to
have one as he has a central line in his chest for intravenous drugs but it was
there none the less. This obviously
distressed him as we hadn’t prepared him for it. He also had the sticky pads from the heart
rate monitor still stuck to his back, which had metal buttons on and were very
uncomfortable. His throat was so sore
and dry from the pipe inserted into his airway that he could hardly speak –
this is also very unusual. So he did not
wake up his usual happy self, he was sore and distressed and it didn’t help
that we had to wait at least 10 minutes in recovery until a porter was found to
wheel his trolley back to the ward.
Once he was back in the ward he slowly came round, the
cannula was removed and he had something to drink and eat and gradually started
to feel better. His back, although
stiff, was not painful as he had been given plenty of local pain relief. Unfortunately though a blood count showed
that he needed both a blood and platelet transfusion. As Ryan needs washed blood products they took
several hours to prepare and so it wasn’t until 6
o’clock that Ryan was connected to the platelets, immediately
followed by the blood. And so it was
after 10pm that we left hospital and
took Ryan back to Sam’s house for the night. Needless to say he is very stiff and sore but was
really happy to come home this morning. We
hope to find out early next week if sufficient stem cells were collected. On a positive note we were really pleased to
be learn that Bristol had agreed to
send Ryan’s bone marrow aspirates to Vienna
for analysis; the trephines will be processed in Bristol
– the results of both tests will take about 2 weeks…
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