Medication Overdose

We need to get out of this hospital... for several reasons really, but mostly because the longer we are here, the more vulnerable we are to human error. Everyone makes mistakes, but when the mistakes can potentially cause long term harm (especially to your child), it's hard to not be extremely upset.

Yesterday morning a doctor came to us and said that the previous night, Eden received a big overdose of one of her antibiotics Vancomycin. He said at the time he wasn't exactly sure how or why it happened, or who was necessarily responsible, but Eden's medication was swapped with another child's and she was given quite a bit more than what she should have received.

He explained that they would have to do blood draws and check her kidneys to make sure they were able to process that amount of medication ok. There was potential for some serious damage to her kidneys.

As you can imagine, I was very upset hearing this information, but by the time he was explaining it, about 12 hours had passed, she seemed ok, and frankly, there was absolutely nothing we could do about it and getting upset wasn't going to change what happened. I just felt that we would have to await results from the lab about her kidneys and deal with it at that point if we had to.

Fortunately, we got a call a couple hours later that the results came back with good news and her kidneys looked like they had processed it fine. In fact, the levels for that particular antibiotic came back low altogether so it appears her body metabolizes it quickly. Thank goodness for that or else we may have been dealing with kidney issues now too.

We are grateful for yet another answer to our prayers. Phew.... another crisis averted. It might be easy sometimes to let the discouragement take over with all that we have had on our plate, but the discouragement doesn't last long when I realize how much we have been blessed and how much Eden has been protected throughout all our medical adventures.