Lots happening, please pray. Jodi and JT returned from Cincinnati Thursday evening and everyone went to bed. That same night JT started coughing and moaning continuously and when I went in to check on him he was under the covers shivering and burning up. I took his temp and it was over 103 degrees – for him, this was a life-threatening crisis. The only other time he’s had a temperature that high was when he almost died at 6 weeks old.

 

So Jodi got on the phone and started calling – our local doctor on call, the Grove City ER, Cincinnati. We gave him 10 ml of Tylenol and I rushed him over to the GC Hospital hoping for the best. We got it. Everyone was there was on the ball: Dr. Glenn got on the horn with the BMT on-call doctor in Cincy and nurse Kim accessed his port on the first try. They started fluids, two different antibiotics, and calcium since he was critically low. Dr. Hefner transferred him to the isolation room in the ICU immediately and took over managing his care in the morning. He was great, checking in on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday while spending a good deal of time on the phone trying to arrange a transfer.

 

Our docs in Cincinnati wanted him there ASAP. No local ambulances were willing to make the 10-hour round trip. On Friday morning, the Cincinnati ambulances said the same thing. So Friday afternoon Dr. Filipovich said fine, we’ll fly him here. Reason #873 that I love Cincinnati Children’s Hospital: they don’t mess around.  They had a 6-passenger plane on standby in Cincinnati Saturday morning at 10:00 waiting to make the flight. Unfortunately, the hurricane weather has been unrelenting – they weren’t able to fly Sat or this morning because they didn’t have a 5000 ft. ceiling…finally a ground transport team from Cincinnati showed up this evening around 5:00 to take him there. Jodi followed in our car.

 

And it’s been a disaster – they’ve pulled over twice now because the ambulance isn’t running properly. The last time they waited for another ambulance to rendezvous with them so now he’s in a different ambulance with different paramedics and they’re not even to Columbus yet.  

The good news in all of this is that JT seems okay. We really, really hope that this is all unnecessary and that his cultures will all be negative and that he’ll pull through whatever this is. Of course it could be something scary but we’re believing that it won’t be. One of the antibiotics he’s on can cause organ damage and deafness so we’re worried about that too – we know that they have to be careful and that infection is a huge, huge risk for him right now so we ask for your prayers for safe travel tonight and for good news from the hospital tomorrow and this upcoming week. Please pray for protection and healing and courage, and remember Jodi too. Thanks.