Kids step up for some action

Seems the kids don't want to let Alison have all the attention.

Annelise & bronchitis
Annelise had her second ever visit to a doctor earlier this week. She had a nasty & persistent cough, slight fever and was just not feeling herself. Turns out she had a mild bout of bronchitis.

With Alison's immune system dropping due to the chemo, it was best that we hit the bronchitis with some antibiotics and try to knock it out early. Annelise is now very excited that she has some medicine to take (just like Harrison with his daily warfarin) and as it gets close to time for her next dose, she is constantly peppering us with questions about how much longer it will be.

Good news is that she seems to be all fine now.

Harrison to Emergency
Harrison decided to lift it all to another level and spent half the night in the Emergency Ward on Friday.

Earlier in the day he was feeling unwell and came home from school around lunchtime. As the afternoon wore on he had high temperatures, headache and pains in his stomach. A visit to the GP suggested it may be appendicitis and came with the recommendation that if it got any worse, take him to Emergency.

Well, it did get worse and we did end up at Emergency. Alison picked me up at work and dropped us both at The Canberra Hospital. Harrison made it through triage pretty quickly and soon found himself in a bed in the paediatric section of the Emergency Ward. (One of the small bonuses of being on warfarin with an artificial valve is that they push you through to doctors pretty quickly.)

At the start there were tears because of the pain in his stomach. After a couple of hours, this seemed to settle and his attention then turned to worrying about having to stay in the hospital overnight. Advice from the doctors and nurses for most of the night was that it was very likely he would have to stay in at least for observation until the next morning.

The big concern was whether he would need surgery. Being on warfarin (which stops blood from clotting) means that surgery can get messy and be quite dangerous if it is unplanned. Luckily, as the night wore on, it seemed the pain had gone away and there were no clinical or pathological signs to indicate he would need surgery.

Eventually, at around 11:00pm we were given the all clear by the paediatrician on duty to head home.

Harrison's still a bit on the edge and is riding the Panadol wave to keep his temperatures down but we can definitely see improvement in the way he is feeling now.


At least we now seem to be heading in the right direction with the kids. I'll do an update on Alison probably later tonight.