A Father's Perspective

The first week in the hospital was extremely frustrating. Everyone kept saying, "Good thing Alex is at the Stolery!" and all I could think was, "God help any little kid who's not here, cause if this place is the best of the best, they'd be toast!" Every procedure I witnessed was botched at least once. An intern 'tried' the spinal tap: while Alex was crying, the Doctor was telling his lacky to just move it around. Finally, I just looked at the doctor and said, "Get this done!"
Day after day went by with zero answers. The doctors just kept guessing - and treating what they were guessing at! "Maybe it's a virus?" They gave him an IV med for viruses. "Maybe it's TB?" They gave him a bunch of IV meds for TB. "It could be this bacteria or that bacteria?" So they gave him a few different broad-spectrum antibiotics. I witnessed nurse after nurse try to give him an IV line - one night it took 4 nurses and 1 doctor eight tries to get the line in: first a couple nurses from ICU tried, then the nurse who was attending him, then the resident Dr. Finally, one of his nurses from Emergency came up and got it on her first try. It was all I could do not to freak out at the combined ineptitude of this staff!

After this night, I asked everyone who would to pray for me. I was so fed up with the lack of answers from the doctors and the continued mess-ups by the nurses, that I was ready to take Alex home - it couldn't be any worse! It culminated when a resident from ICU came up to ICE, where Alex was staying and tried to bully us into moving him down to her unit - that was the closest I'd been to hitting anyone in a long time.
Thankfully, God began to soften my heart, and get us some help. The nurses in the ICE were fantastic from that day forward. My aunt helped out with some homeopathic remedies, which seemed to help immediately - within hours of the first dose is when we began to notice some improvement. And, once they found the stroke, the doctors finally had something they could work with; and, Dr. R was doing an amazing job at keeping everything coordinated between the Infectious Disease team, Neurologists, Stroke specialists, Thrombosis (clot) specialists, Rheumatology, and different radiologist... I may have left a team or two out - oh yeah, they added a gastro team in there, too.

Thankfully, we've had lots of support through all of this. Our family is FANTASTIC! And, all of they prayers from the people at HoPE and C3 Edmonton have really lifted our spirits and given us strength. I am fully convinced that it was these prayers that kept Alex going during the worst of it all. And, their prayers continue to help. Without all of this great support, I don't know where we'd be. Even in this horrible time, we feel truly blessed!