Wednesday, May 03, 2006

A call in the middle of the night

We got the first of our middle of the night phone calls from the hospital last night. When the caller ID showed a 617 phone number I almost barfed and when I heard the nurse's voice saying that she was calling from Children's I was very close to it. Fortunately, the nurse was a real pro and knew about her audience. The first words out of her mouth were "Ellie's fine."

Gotta love professionals.

It turns out that since Ellie has had so many blood tests in the past week for this, that, and the other thing, her little 7 pound body was running a quart of so low. She was going to need a blood transfusion. No big deal, they just wanted to be sure we were okay with it. No signs of bleeding, no signs of other problems, she was just stuck by a few too many phlebotomists over the last few days. Yeah, I said phlebotomist. Didn't even need to spell check it. My vocabulary is swelling with this hospital stuff.


Anastomosis, atresia, Necrotizing Enterocolitis (thankfully not relating to Ellie, though). The list goes on each day.

This was a welcome explanation for Abby and I who noticed that Ellie was lethargic yesterday and didn't have her normal period of being awake cute as can be Ellie. It turns out that her red blood cells were not all there and therefore not enough oxygen was doing it job and she was sleepy.

So a transfusion of fresh blood perked her up and made me want to give blood today. Unfortunately we were pretty busy with other stuff and it didn't get done.

Maybe tomorrow. How many people say that every day? Apparently children's needs a lot of blood each day to do the great stuff that they do. I am on it manana. I promise.

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