A week of downs and ups

Worries in Barnet (9 Mar)

Last Saturday we were worried.

Little S had picked up another kiddie bug a couple of days before and her symptoms were getting similar to how she was in December - very lethargic, not walking, smiling, playing or eating. She didn't have swollen feet or hands but she was far from herself.

And we weren't going to wait until she did this time.

So Saturday morning we were off to Barnet Hospital and within 1.5 hours we'd seen the nurse, the doctor, had a chest x-ray (to figure out if she had a chest infection) and were just waiting for the registrar to take a look and decide whether to prescribe anti-biotics.

So J headed off for lunch at some friends (her sister had already taken the kids there) and I was left to munch on a chicken leg and a challah roll - she'd then come back to pick me up once we were done.

Five hours later we were still waiting!

The silver lining of Little S being so lethargic was that I could just sit and sit and read my book! But it wasn't exactly how I'd intended to spend Shabbat.

On J's return I went in search of the registrar and talked my way back into the pediatric A&E (we'd been moved to a ward hours before). I convinced them to find the registrar and then explained that we were leaving in 30 minutes as Little S had to get home for her evening heart meds. To be fair, she apologised - a whole load of emergency cases had turned up during the afternoon and she was the only pediatric registrar in the entire hospital! So, although she would much rather have taken the time to find and examine Little S, she ended up just writing a prescription there and then and the A&E nurse dispensed the anti-biotics from the cupboard next to her!

Better in GOSH (14 Mar)

After a couple of days of anti-biotics, Little S had started to improve. 

By Thursday we were back in GOSH and she was pretty much back to 'normal' again. (Annoying to have to put normal in quotes but then that was why we were back in GOSH wasn't it?).

They were really pleased to see her again on Walrus ward. Dr D didn't even recognize her as she had had her first haircut since our last visit!

But he was very happy with how she'd been doing - he increased her beta-blocker to the full dose and reduced both of the diaretics to once a day instead of twice.

We mentioned that we're intending to head down to Brighton for a few days during the Easter holidays and he said that he didn't think that we need to arrange for oxygen machines whilst we're there (none of us think that they're really doing anything for her) - just taking a couple of emergency cannisters of oxygen should be enough. Brilliant!

Oh, and it's Little S's second birthday in under three weeks - now that's something to celebrate!

Na'aseh Nes L'Shoshanim ...

A good heart these days is hard to find ... in Japan

So it appears that a big reason that Dr S has been doing his pioneering operations to combat heart failure using heart stem cells is because there are so few heart transplants performed in Japan.

The first heart transplant in Japan for 30 years was performed in February 1999 following a change in the law to allow organs to be donated on being declared brain-dead rather than only once the heart had stopped as was the case previously.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/287880.stm

However, further legislation was necessary in 2009 to make transplants more widely available as, during the previous year, only 11 heart transplants had been performed in Japan (compared to 2,000 in the USA) and about 400 Japanese would die each year as they were unable to get a heart transplant.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ajgBoFtYJFKI