Yesterday I left the ward for a couple of hours to come home for a shower and break. When I got back at around 3 pm I was told that Massimo’s temperature had just spiked to 39.5ºC and the nurse gave him some Calpol. His temperature came down to 38ºC but still not the 36.5ºC he normally is. When J and Kamilla came to see us at around 6 pm, Massimo’s secretions from nose, mouth and trachy were profuse and the hyoscine patch that I had put on an hour before didn’t seem to be having much of an effect. (The patch has now started to have some effect 12 hours later.) Anyway, J and I went out for some supper and when I came back I noticed that Massimo just wasn’t settling well, and every time he fell asleep he would wake up irritable a short while later. These are all symptoms of an infection and possibly an infection in his shunt, so when I spoke to the doctor at 11 pm at night she was galvanised into action. By midnight they had listened to his chest and found him wheezy, inserted a canula (thingy into vein for quick and easy access), taken loads of samples of blood and sent them off for analysis and had a chest x-ray taken (portable chest as they say in ER!). All these results came back normal, except that his haemoglobin levels are a little low. This morning the nurses took samples of his nasal and tracheostomy secretions and those have been sent off too.
At doctors rounds Massimo was diagnosed as having a viral infection. So we need to wait and see how he is on Wednesday before making a decision as to whether to go ahead with the MLB etc. In the meantime, fingers crossed.
On the positive side his shunt does seem to have had a beneficial effect. He seems to be much more alert and aware of his surroundings and yesterday morning he looked me straight in the eyes and gave me the most amazingly huge smile, my heart melted.