Sam-continued

Sunday morning. Sam has been awake most of the night, I think he maybe slept 30 minutes 3 or 4 times. He was so thirsty, so hungry, hurting with cramps. His sodium and potassium have started to drop, but one of the readings showed that it dropped a little too quick. The doctor came in around 7 am and said that we are not to give him anything in his mouth at all. He is not to eat. He went over the GI track with us, and how it works. Sam's GI track was so inflamed that the cilia inside were paralyzed, therefore all the jello, popsicles, and pedialyte we gave him was literally going down him like a slide. He said that we needed to do "bowel rest" for at least 48 hours, meaning no food, no iv food, just IV fluids to maintain his electrolytes. He said as a doctor this is what needs to happen, but socially this is going to be extremely difficult. Sam will want to eat, he is already weak, but he will want to drink. You will need to take shifts with him, because it will be too much for you to be here all the time. By this time I am bawling, I was already crying since I couldn't help Sam anyway, but now I am sobbing. There is no way I will leave him at the hospital. We have family helping us and giving us much needed breaks, but not breaks away from the hospital. We asked what was wrong with him, and why this was happening, and he said they don't know at this point. They are waiting on cultures from American Fork to come back, and they would be taking their own at Primary's. He then said that he and the other doctors had never seen so much stool output in any one person. Stool output is measured per kilo of weight. A normal person has an output of 20-40 per kilo per day. When you have bad diarrhea you will have about 60-80 per day, Sam had 500 that day. Which means he crapped 5 liters in 24 hours. Nobody at Primary Children's has ever seen that amount of output. Next, because his sodium level dropped from 155 to 148 in 2 hours, they wanted to do a CT scan to make sure there isn't any brain swelling. OK. How do you watch your little 17 month old go into a machine that is WAY too big, and scary? We were able to stand with him next to the CT machine, then the tech told us why they were doing this again. I am crying, I am trying to not let Sam see me crying. He was actually doing pretty good at this point. He was really worn out from the last 3 nights, and pretty weak anyway from all the trauma he had been through. The CT was normal, and we were relieved. The IV team came and took massive amounts of blood, and the day went on. He had an abdominal xray to make sure there wasn't anything wrong internally, and that came back normal as well. Sam didn't poop from about 10 am Sunday until Wednesday! They continued to prick every 2 hours, and a little bigger one at 4 hours. Shad and I were getting really frustrated that they couldn't tell us what was wrong, why he was so sick. Down the hall from us we could hear the doctors talking about him in their boardroom. They had a team of about 20 doctors and interns/residents trying to figure out what was happening, and what to do from there. They were saying the only thing this resembles is cholera. What? That doesn't even exist here! That is what they said too, but the stool output, the throwing up etc. Sunday turned into Sunday night,it went a little better than Saturday, he slept for about an hour and a half at a time and Shad and I took turns staring at him. Monday morning came. His levels of electrolytes and his blood gas finally stabilized around midnight on Sunday. Monday we got another visit from the doctor and he said he is almost certain it was a bacteria in his blood known as bacillus, cereus. They would begin an IV antibiotic and continue with the fluids. We were still waiting on the blood work they had taken, but he was 95% sure it was bacillus. He said that the most common cause of this is from rice, grain, or even some fruits and takes anywhere from 1 to 16 hours to germinate. Nice, so I was the one who gave him poison. This is a VERY rare type bacteria and this is why it took so long to figure out. They were certain it was the cereus species yet, but for sure it was in the bacillus family. Monday dragged on. We took turns holding him, and giving him loves. It was so difficult watching him lay there looking like he wasn't going to make it much longer. (and to think the worst was behind us)