I Had a Feeling It Wouldn't Last

Resting peacefully, right? I guess you could say this is the calm after the storm, or possibly in between storms as it is too early to tell. Up until today's treatment Fletcher had done amazingly well with the transfusions (via IV and lumbar), almost stepford-wife-perfect. It was really quite odd. He previously had a little trouble staying settled for the full six hours after the procedure, but his actions during the transfusions had been calm, cool and collected. I knew it couldn't last, and it didn't.

Since the di.azepam they'd been giving him didn't really sedate him, they decided to do the rectal ch.loral hyd.rate pre-treatment. It made him drowsy, but in a fussy way, not the spacey way the di.azepam had made him feel. I heard him cry during the procedure, but I couldn't do anything about it and it just made me nervous so I went back to my room and tried to distract myself. He was okay when he came out, and happy enough when Kristin was entertaining him while I called Trevor go give him an update, but when they started doing his post-treatment vitals he just lost it and couldn't get it back together. He cried for a long time. I wasn't watching the clock and I am very bad at estimating times, but I am guessing it was a good 30 minutes of various degrees of uncontrollable sobbing.

I tried singing, and patting, counting and cooing, but nothing was working. The one thing that would probably console him is picking him up, but that is the one thing I could not do. I had to roll him onto his side because the saliva and snot production kicks into high gear when he screams for that long and if positioned on his back he would choke. I rang for a nurse and she brought the doctor who decided that an intramuscular injection of phen.ergan was the way to go. While they were gone to get the shot Fletcher vomited up a nice big pile of mucous due to his prolonged crying jag.

I don't think I have ever heard Fletcher scream like he did when they gave him the IM shot. I had to give myself plenty of IM shots during my IVF days and I can tell you that relaxing the target muscle is key. Fletcher cannot do this on his own, so I imagine the shot was pretty painful. He had his eyes closed during most of this fussing/crying episode, but when the nurse gave him the shot his eyes opened wide and he just looked at me with such an accusing stare. I wanted to cry myself, but I knew that would just make things worse, so I willed myself to be the strong, stoic, comforting mommy.

After a couple of minutes the shot kicked in and he is resting as pictured above. He has been asleep for about 75 minutes now, although he did wake up about 20 minutes ago, fussed for a minute, vomited up another mouthful of mucous and then promptly fell back to sleep as I lightly cupped his head and stroked his hair like I did when he was in the incubator in the NICU. I spoke with the doctor and we both agree that the vomiting is due to him swallowing too much saliva and mucous during his crying fit and nothing more sinister. It is already over two hours post-procedure and we have been given the green light for food and drink, so hopefully after a (cross-your-fingers) nice long nap I will be able to distract him the rest of the time with some graham crackers and rice milk.

To leave you on a happy note, I have included a slideshow of some random pics around the hospital over the last couple of days.