Doing The Rounds of Emergency Departments

"What's that?" My imagination heard Frankie ask with innocence. "4 tubes coming out my mouth in 1 day nearly pushed you over the edge? Interesting. How about a second trip to an emergency department only 4 days after the last?"

Honestly...this kid.

Yesterday Frankie vomited 12 times. 12 violent times. Anyone who has ever seen Frankie vomit can vouch for the fact that it is quite the drama. Her eyes roll back in her head, she goes bright red and she retches, sometimes for minutes, trying with every bit of her might, to empty her stomach. Add to that a sound that can only be compared to that of a hungover, middle-aged man and you get some idea of what we're dealing with. Except, it's not just the vomiting. She's also a one year old. So she's teething. She has a weird rash that nobody seems able to explain. She had her immunisations last week. She falls and bangs her head. And as we were about to find out...sometimes, like one year olds do, she just gets sick.

This morning Frankie had vomited 6 times before 8am. She coughed and gagged from 5am, keeping herself awake and then went on to vomit 6 damn times. Normally she's quite happy after a vomit. Today though...she was gosh darn miserable. Whinging, whining, and generally doing things that a teething baby with a weird rash would do. So what the heck was happening? After talking to our nurse navigator at our Gold Coast hospital we made the decision to hightail it to the Queensland Children's Hospital in Brisbane. That's where the gastro team is based and everybody kept telling us that they would be the ones to have answers.

When we loaded Frankie into the car and for a whole hour drive she sat silently, we knew something was very wrong. Frankie hates the car and likes to tell you all about that fact given any opportunity. Loudly. So for her to just sit there, swallowing hard to keep vomit down, for a full hour, was seriously out of character.

Thanks to a violent spew on cue as I stood talking to the emergency triage nurse, we were ushered through very quickly. Frankie's previous medical trauma means that anybody in a mask, or scrubs, is a serious threat. So even getting a probe on her foot to get her blood oxygen level was a vomit-inducing mess. And I can't blame her. Once the machine started beeping I was immediately transported back to our 2 months in special care where the same machine beeped incessantly telling us that Frankie wasn't breathing, or her oxygen was too low, or her heart-rate too high. We watched the 'events' tally up on the screen for those 8 weeks and watched Frankie turn blue on multiple occasions. So the stress of hearing that beeping again was just horrible.

Long story short, while the blood-glucose and ketones tests weren't pleasant, and the respiratory up-the-schnoz swab was so gross I couldn't even watch, it was the urine-catch that was most entertaining. Cue a nappy-free baby, multiple absorbent blueys, one miss, a wee soaked shirt and, finally, a catch.

After an x-ray to check the placement of her tube, which was put in at Frankie's emergency visit 4 days ago, three members of the gastroenterology department graced us with their presence. I have seen many transpyloric tube X-rays over the past 2 months so I quizzed them on the placement of the tube having noticed it was sitting a helluva long way past her stomach. The doctor's response with a smirk..."Well...we're feeding her toes but we won't worry unless we see it come out the other end." Classic.

After 6 hours in the emergency department, three nurses, one emergency doctor, three gastroenterologists and one radiologist we were on our way home. The gastro team had talked us through a range of different scenarios, possible medication trial and surgery options but we would need to wait and talk to the big boss man.

Leaving Brisbane and heading down the M1 at 5pm on a week day wasn't perfect timing but thankfully an exhausted Frankie sat there swallowing vomit down for the full hour and a half it took us to get home. By 8:30pm Frankie was in her cot being woken up by her coughing, gagging and retching. We were right back where we were at 5am this morning.