65 and 74

Monday 11 November 2013

Little S was feeling a bit under the weather, suffering from a bad cold for the previous week or so, more lethargic than usual and not as smiley as normal, so we had a feeling that when we went to GOSH her sats might be a bit down and she might not quite be her usual sparkly self.

Well her sats were definitely down, down to 65% which isn’t good even for Little S.

Dr D was concerned.

He began discussing the shunt connecting her heart to her reconstructed pulmonary artery - highlighting the possibility that it may no longer be delivering enough oxygen.

If so, they may need to use a balloon to expand the artery as part of a catheterisation procedure.

He was fairly sure that this would need to happen at some point but was hoping, I think, that it might not be for a little while yet as any procedure carries risks, especially whilst undergoing heart failure.

We weren’t convinced.

He seemed to think that her sats had been in decline for a few months but we were pretty sure that they’d been stable at about 70% since the spring.

So we decided to get a community nurse to visit on a weekly basis to take Little S’s sats and check whether they would recover once she gets over her bug (J also though that they may have not measured sats properly at GOSH this time).

Little S also had to have a blood test which she wasn’t best pleased about although the problem was much more about putting on the anesthetic cream and plaster than actually sticking a needle in and taking the blood! The nurses ended up using cling film instead of a plaster which seemed to do the trick.

Before the community nurse turned up we thought we’d get hold of our own sats monitor so that we could check ourselves.

So I ordered one from Amazon – seemed to have good reviews and be suitable for toddlers but when we tried it out, although it worked fine for J and me it went haywire when trying to measure Little S!

Thankfully the community nurse had better luck and a week after going to GOSH, Little S had recorded 73%.

She’d pulled it off again – another recovery.

And next week she got 74%, her best score since leaving hospital last New Year’s Eve!

The black cloud had scuttled away again, settling back onto the horizon.