Aidan was feeling so good he chose to walk to his new room, being quite charming the whole way. The new private room was very nice, but of course it meant getting used to a whole new team of medical professionals again. They had to draw some more blood, which was a nightmare for him again, but a nice nurse brought him some very cool toys as a reward. And then there was some confusion about lunch, since we started waiting on the room transfer at about 10:45, but didn't actually get in the new room until about 12:30. (Each floor assumed we'd eaten on the other.) I kept asking, but it was finally about 1:30 by time his lunch arrived. Not the best for a newly diagnosed diabetic kid who needs to eat meals at regular times. Hmmpfh.
It was about now that Weston arrived. We are truly grateful that Weston's sister was willing and able to take a day off, and drive up from Champaign to watch the kids so Weston could come out for a few hours. We also had friends helping earlier in the AM with childcare and with transporting Caleb to school. Such great support.
We barely got to converse though, before we had our next hour long training session. This time with the nurse from the Pediatric Diabetes Resource Center (the great center at the Children's Hospital that we are going to quickly get to know really well). She brought the supplies (medicine, syringes, shot pen, glucometer, etc) and trained us how to use them. She was great, and we even had to practice on her with saline. I'm so glad Weston was there for that, it was a lot of information, crucial information, to take in.
After she left, we had a few minutes to gather our thoughts before our next training session, this time with a social worker. She talked more about the emotional aspect of this diagnosis, for him and us, and a lot about how to develop a plan for handling all this at school.
Phew. So much information to take it. After awhile you can only thoroughly process so much, but we were coming a long way fast.
Weston had to leave around 4 in order to make it back for Junior High Youth Group. We had been visited several times by our endocrinologist throughout our stay, and she was really leaning towards letting us go home that night. Aidan was super excited about that, and although it felt a little scary, we knew we could do it, and kind of just needed to dive into doing things on our own. So we were hoping that Weston would just be able to drive back out after youth group (with more huge support from a friend watching the boys) to pick us up.
Aidan and I had dinner, and tried to relax a bit. They had video games on the TV, and I had my Ipod so he was good. We also worked on a Star Wars puzzle that they gave us.
I was brave enough to try his finger poke for the first time at dinner, and he loved that the lancet (poker thing) they gave us seemed to hurt a lot less than the hospital grade one the nurses had to use. It required way less blood, also. The PDRC nurse said we could use ours to poke, but that even though she wanted us to use our glucometer to practice, the hospital had to use theirs as well, which was fine. Little did I know what issues that was going to cause later.
I even did my first shot on him with our new 'pen' (much easier than a syringe). He didn't like it tons, but didn't do too badly.
Weston's sister Robin stopped by on her way home for a visit. It was very nice to see her, and it lifted Aidan's spirits also. (I forgot to mention he also had 2 visitors earlier than morning also; our interim children's pastor and an elder. So very nice of them!)
We got a visit from the endocrinologist around 6:30. She was ready to check his BS and then discharge us if it was acceptable. However, when we did it, our glucometer read in the 440's, and the hospital glucometer read above 500. Since she was there, she mercifully cancelled the extra blood draw (which I guess is protocal for the nurses if levels are above 500). This is when I saw a nurse get super snooty and disrespectful toward the doctor because our doctor cancelled the blood draw because she felt it unnecessary, and didn't want to put Aidan through more junk. The doctor was satisfied with the number on our personal meter(as opposed to the hospital's), but wanted to test him again at 9PM, before she felt okay discharging us. I was comfortable with this.
Unfortunately, this left Weston in limbo, as he decided to go ahead and make sitter arrangements, and to start driving out around 8:45 just in case we got the green light after the 9PM BS check.
Finally 9 o'clock rolled around. They came in to test, and we had a repeat scenario of earlier. Our personal meter read in the 450's, and the hospital one read above 500. (By this point I was pretty irritated that two glucometers could test the same blood and have such a discrepancy. Isn't that dangerous?)
The hard part now was that there had been a shift change, and the team of nurses now on duty hadn't had the whole experience with the doctor earlier. They treated me as if my glucometer didn't count. They asked if I had 'callibrated' it. During the whole training on it earlier, the nurse had never mentioned that at all, and she'd used it and relied on it just fine. But now, they treated me as if I was ignorant because I didn't know about it, and that must be why my meter was so 'off'. I went on a personal quest through the instructional book trying to figure all that out. There was one nicer nurse who was helping me. We finally found some instructions for callibrating it, and some control solution. But now, the instructions had different target results for different kind of control solutions (low, regular, or high), but our control solution DID NOT specify what kind it was. I was about ready to lose it by this point. The nurse was checking with other nurses trying to figure it out. I finally did find a number to call on the manual, so I called it. 25 minutes after a painful conversation with a guy who couldn't speak English very clearly and who treated me as if I was bothering him, I was finally given the info that our control solution was 'regular'. So we were able to perform the callibration test... to find out the glucometer was reading accurately all along. Ugh. But, they had already followed hospital protocal for their machine and ordered more blood tests, and one more in the middle of the night. Poor guy.
Meanwhile, the endrincologist had been called, and she made the call that we needed to stay through the night to continue monitoring. About this time Weston arrived. :/ At least he got to visit with us a bit before he had to turn around and head back home, and he listened to me vent a bit (all the while I am trying to stay so calm and collected in front of Aidan, since the last thing he needed was to see his mom as an emotional wreck).
Fortunately, Aidan and I were so exhausted, that we were able to sleep a little better that night. There was actually a pull-out bed in this room, which was wonderful. I woke up to help him to the bathroom a few times, and to listen to his cries a few times as they were checking him, but he calmed down pretty quickly each time.
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