Last night was our longest night in the hospital, and possibly the longest I can remember having for quite some time. When we returned from Eila's stent placement procedure, we realized that the drainage bag was leaking fluid. This was right at the changing time for the nurses, so she got a whole team working on getting the old one off, cleaning her up, and carefully placing a new one. While eating dinner and watching movies, we realized there was a small leak still but we hoped it would be manageable.
At 1 am, we finally had Eila all settled down for the night (I know, I know, we're still on West Coast time), and we were all exhausted from the extra excitement of the day. At 1:27 am, Eila called out that she was too wet to sleep, so we got up to try to help. When we got to the side of her bed, our 5 year old was lying in a
pool of blood -- her blood!! I don't think I can even begin to describe the instant fear and stress that exploded inside us, and the only thing that kept us from going completely off the deep end was that Eila wasn't panicked or stressed, just uncomfortable. We called the nurse in, who immediately called the head nurse and the surgical resident. One potential risk that had been mentioned to us was
thrombosis
(a blood clot that would cut off the supply to the kidney), so we were
concerned about losing her kidney. The surgical resident took photos of
the bag/bed and left to contact the fellow.
Her drainage bag was filled with clotted blood. Her gown was soaked in blood. Her bed sheets were red with blood, and now as we were finally changing them, there was a pool of blood under her that we soaked up with towels. It felt like so much blood, yet Eila was still acting normal just tired (by now it's about 2:30 in the morning).
The resident returned with instructions on lab work to order and more information for us. They drew blood to check her blood counts, her kidney function, and her clotting times. We waited and worried, Eila fell asleep. Her counts were down some from last week, but still within a normal range -- no transfusion needed. Her kidney levels (creatinine, etc.) were within the normal range. Her clotting time was within the normal range. The fellow was happy with these results, thought that it was likely that she had a hemotoma (a collection of blood that had pooled near her surgery site) burst, and said we just needed to keep an eye on things -- the team would round by 7 am. By now it was 4 am, Eila was sound asleep and the resident suggested that we get sleep too. The nurse said she would could in every hour to check on her.
We did finally get a little sleep and talked with the surgical team at 7 during rounds. During the last 3 hours, Eila had another smaller surge of blood that created more clots in the bag and a mess on her bed (but not as big as the first one, which the nurse categorized as "medium"). They needed to do a lot of feeling/pushing on her belly and changing the sheets, all of which caused Eila pain. She got more pain medicine and the fellow ordered another round of blood work and an ultrasound to be sure the problem was resolving; she said everything felt soft so she wasn't too concerned. She also explained that Eila was outside of the window of risk of thrombosis (that was more at the time of surgery).
The pain medicine helped, the ultrasound showed nothing of concern, the blood work has slightly lowered numbers but still within range, and there hasn't been any more large surges of blood. The urologist thinks that the stent made have helped disturbed a hematoma that came out through the penrose (drainage tube), but we'll continue to watch her. It is 12:37 pm as I write this and Eila is still sleeping. I'm glad this night is over.
