A Trip to Children's Hospital

One evening after dinner, we sat down to play and I noticed Julian wasn't using his left arm to grab toys or crawl around. Julian usually does not stay in one spot for very long, so it was definitely unusual. I touched his arm and that's when the wailing began. We decided to take him to Urgent Care to figure out if he just had a bad bruise, a fracture, or what was going on.


We got to urgent care around 7pm and it was PACKED! It looked like there were a ton of sport injuries from school activities! It was finally our turn and we got an x-ray taken and some blood work. The x-ray didn't show a fracture, but the blood work indicated that Julian had a pretty nasty infection. Based off of some other symptoms and the blood work, the doctor told us he thought Julian had a bone or joint infection and that we would need to immediately go to Children's Hospital for an MRI.

We arrived at Children's around midnight and we were taken to a private (tiny) ER room to wait until morning for an MRI. In the meantime, Julian was completely miserable and we weren't allowed to feed him before getting anesthesia. It was so tough hearing him fuss for food and being unable to do anything about it.

We were finally called for an MRI at 6:30am, so we took him to get his first round of anesthesia. I thought I was going to lose it. I held it together in the room so Julian didn't freak out, and they told us that the MRI would take about an hour and to just wait nearby. We grabbed breakfast and tried to patiently wait to hear that Julian was out.  Once the MRI was done, we were sent back to the ER room to wait for results. After a good bit of waiting, we found out that Julian did have a joint infection and that he would be admitted and we would be sending him for surgery that afternoon.

 

It was finally Julian's turn to go into surgery. Once again, I tried really hard to hold it together while we walked him down to the OR. He would get another round of anesthesia and then surgery to flush the joint of the bacteria. Seeing him cry as they took him back was really tough. Then the waiting game again.

We grabbed some dinner and sat with all the other parents waiting to hear that their kiddo was out of surgery. After a bit, the surgeon came out and told us Julian was done with surgery and in recovery coming out of anesthesia. More waiting. We were finally brought back to sit with him and convinced the nurse to let him have some apple juice to calm his hunger.

He had a big cast on his arm to protect it for the time being. We were taken back to Julian's room, and he started IV antibiotics, which continued for a couple days before they finally told us we could go home!

What a rough week! This little boy is such a champ for making it out of that with a good attitude!