Drama

Well, when I named Kyle I knew that "handsome, bright fame" would be the perfect meaning of his name. I could tell he was going to be a drama king.

Thursday night, my mom called me in a panic just as I was getting off work at 7:00pm. Kyle had yanked on his feeding tube and finally succeeded in pulling out the Mic-Key button (the part that is actually inserted into the stomach). I told my mom it wasn't that big of a deal. The nurses had all told us that it was likely to happen. They had explained that if the "peg" came out, we needed to get to the closest emergency room within an hour to be sure they could put in a new peg before the hole sealed up but as long as there was not a lot of blood, not to worry.

So Mom packed up the kids and headed to the Countryside Mease Hospital Emergency Room. I managed to get there just a couple of minutes after they did and Chris arrived a couple of minutes after that. But we waited another half hour before they called Kyle back.

I was seriously disappointed in the emergency room at this hospital. Maybe I've just been spoiled by All Children's Hospital but when we're brought into a patient room, I expect a hospital bed. I do NOT expect to see bloody gauze on the floor! We had a couple of nurses come in, each asking why he was on a feeding tube in the first place and who seemed to be confused by the whole concept of a Mic-Key button. One even asked if he pulled it out of his nose. I explained that it was not a NASOgastric tube.

After nearly three hours in the room without seeing an actual doctor and with nurses saying that they didn't know if even their pediatric floor had Mic-Key buttons, I was pushed to my limit. I called Kyle's pediatric gastroenterologist's on-call doctor. The timing was great. Just as the doctor finally came in, I was talking on the phone with the nurse practitioner from GI. She told me that what they had to do was to put in a foley catheter to hold the hole open and to use as a feeding tube for that night and I would need to go in to have the hole dilated the next day to put in another Mic-Key button. I handed the phone over to the doctor so they could repeat what they had told me. He was saying how hesitant he was to put in the foley since this wasn't something they were accustomed to doing and he was concerned that damage may have been done when the button was pulled out but the GI nurse practioner explained the process.

So, three hours after the button was pulled out, they finally brought in a foley catheter to put in its place. The doctor first tried the 14 french size (the size of the mic-key button) catheter but it was too big. The doctor commented that the hole was really small and I muttered that it was much wider when we got there. He finally was able to get the 12 french size catheter in. He insisted on putting some dye through the catheter and taking an X-ray to make sure the hole was still good and it wouldn't leak into the abdomen. Kyle was not amused. Dye does not rest easy on the stomach.

The X-ray techs were all impressed by how calm he was and how still he lay there while they took the X-rays. It was nothing new for him.

Yesterday morning I called the GI's office to see about bringing Kyle in for having the mic-key button put back in but I got a very different story about what to do. First, they told me that we had to order a new Mic-Key button and wait for it to come in the mail. Then, they said that since the doctor put in a 12-french catheter instead of 14-french, that we'd have to wiggle the catheter around twice a day for a week to dilate the hole before they could put in the new button. I do not feel comfortable going a week with this tiny foley catheter. There's really nothing to hold it in place (except for the ton of tape I have in place) and I'm worried that he'll pull this out too. One thing's for sure... If he does pull it out again, we're going straight to All Children's. The half hour extra drive is worth the extra timely care.