Children's Mercy Hospital Rules

Filed Under: Life

I planned a post about how I once again screwed up the chip lead heading into a final table situation. This led to a 3rd place finish in the Coral on Paradise Saturday night.

Instead my days have since been a succession of 3 ER visits resulting in the eventual admission of my 9 year old to the hospital. The doctors can't give us a definitive answer on exactly what's wrong with him other than to tell us they think it's a bacterial infection of his colon. The test results for this won't be back until Tuesday night. We hope one of these comes back positive because the alternative is a disease that he will have to deal with for the rest of his life. Since he's already on morphine for the pain I can't fathom what a lifetime of this type of pain could result in.

In fact just typing that statement sickens my stomach. It's been a frustrating experience because the first ER we visited said it was just a bad case of diarrhea. When his pain didn't go away we visited our pediatrician's office and the on-call doctor prescribed immodium and a McDonalds Happy Meal (because these don't digest easily and will hopefully slow down his bowel). When Sunday came and he just seemed to be getting worse we finally visited the Children's Hospital Urgent Care. They believed it may be appendicitis but wanted a CT scan to confirm. They lacked the equipment onsite so we were shipped to the main Hospital downtown.

After 10 hours of tests and waiting around we were told he would have to be admitted and will be in the hospital for at least a few days. Also it turns out that the pediatrician prescribed the worse possible thing we could have given him.

I have to say that Children's Mercy has been extremely attentive to our entire family's needs. We found out today that the doctor we saw in the ER a few times was actually the Chief of Medicine for the entire hospital. It was nice to know we were in the care of the best they had. I'm not sure how he managed to decide to take our case, it was probably because it presented as so many different things and was difficult to diagnose. It is a teaching hospital and we saw a minimum of 10 different doctors at varying times. Having to recite the entire case history each time is a tedious process that really wears on you.

They won't let siblings stay in the hospital overnight so my wife is staying with him while I stay home at night. To top it off we think our youngest may now have come down with strep. This means another visit to the pediatrician in the morning before heading to the hospital.