Saint Marys - Day 9

This was our first full day in the Pediatric Inpatient unit. It was pretty slow and quiet. They drew some blood for lab work this morning (I thought it wasn't going to be until tonight or tomorrow morning) and finally took out Garrett's feeding tube. It sounded like they didn't realize he hadn't been using it for over a day anyway.

Last night's nurse had wheeled a hospital bed into the room for me to sleep on instead of the couch, which was very nice. And Garrett's monitors hardly beeped at all (the oxygen monitor would often misread the level in the PICU, so there was frequent dinging there), so he and I both had fewer disruptions from that.

The one scare in the middle of the night was when I heard Garrett half coughing, half gagging. I was by his side in a flash (and only then remembered that I have an incision I need to be careful of -- ouch) and saw that he had managed to pull his feeding tube out a little. He had been looking for his fingers, and accidentally got one caught under the tube as he was wiggling around.

I called the nurse in to see what to do, and she gently pushed it back in. I was surprised that it didn't seem to bother him too much. Just the same, I'm glad they've taken it out now so he can't mess with it anymore.

This afternoon, they told me the lab work showed he had slightly elevated levels of two of the medicines, but that's normal for someone Garrett's size, so the specialists don't feel compelled to change the dosage. Nobody over here has said anything about when we'll be leaving, but if the lab work looked good enough and he's been slowly gaining weight, I would think they'd let us out of here soon.