Back in the hopital

So first off please forgive me if this all seems like a mess. Once again we have had another urgent operation.This time it was for an infection that was starting to set into his head.

This past weekend we noticed that he had a funky smell coming from his head when you got up really close to it. It was seeping a little blood but Alvin had been acting fine and not running a fever or seeming otherwise painful so we didn't worry about it. We just did our best to keep it clean and dry and things seemed fine.

I decided to call the neurosurgery clinic on Monday just to be sure but continued to think that I was just paranoid. I received no call back Monday and figured it was because my personal cell phone doesn't get reception in the office I called back Tuesday morning and left my work cell phone number. The nurse practitioner called me back and said they wanted to go ahead and see him at 3pm today just to be sure we were ok.

I left work around 1:30 saying that things were fine and I would be back tomorrow.

When I got home W told me that the smell had gotten much worse and that part of his scab had turned green. So off to the hospital we went.

The nurse practitioner took a look at it and cleaned it the best as well as she could and remove some of the caked on glue but soon realized she needed a surgeon to look at him.

The surgeon came in and gave us 2 options. One was to use a topical antibiotic ointment and oral antibiotics and see if that worked. The other option was to take him to the OR and clean it   out and do a full debridement of the area. I told him just to do what was best. He took a couple of pictures and went to show the attending surgeon Dr. Lee who also did his ETV surgery. She came in and said she just thought it was best he go to the OR and get this taken care of once and for all.

Calls then went out to family and W arrived with Elliot. We got him back to the OR and went to grab a bite to eat. After about 45 min we were paged to go wait for him in another room and were told he was waking up. W and Elliot then had to leave and I went back to stay with him.

Waking up was really hard again. He was in a lot of pain and really disoriented. Once the pain was under control we moved to the surgical unit where he will stay.

From what his surgeon told us it smelled worse than it was. He will be kept in the hospital for a few days while they culture what was found and give him heavy doses of antibiotics. She is confident this is just a minor setback for him.

So now we wait. I'll post more as all this continues but right now we are doing well. Once we know more about what is going on I'll send out another update but for the moment we are once again glad to have Seattle Children's Hospital close by and a neurosurgical team that is so good with him.