William

William spent a week in the hospital during November.  My visiting teachers came over, so I sent the kids out to play on the trampoline.  He came back in crying, but I thought he was just trying to get out of finishing his homework.  He kept crying so I sent him to bed.  In his bed he started screaming in pain, and he got up and threw up, so I called Kevin.  Kevin came home from work early and took William to the emergency room.

The CT scan showed that William had a lacerated kidney.  The hospital transported him to Sunrise Hospital in an ambulance because with their new children's wing, they could better treat his injury.

When we told doctors that his injury happened on the trampoline, they didn't believe that a trampoline was enough to do the damage that was caused to his kidney.  We had been in Utah the previous weekend, and William had a minor accident on my parents' ATV, so we're thinking that's what caused the injury and the trampoline just aggravated it.

I have to say, for being our valley's children's hospital, I was very disappointed with Sunrise.  We were there to make sure he had no internal bleeding.  I guess the kidney is encapsulated, so it should heal on it's own as long as he wasn't bleeding out of it.  They found out right away that he had no internal bleeding, so I thought we should be able to go home and have him take it easy for a while.  But we had some surgeon come in and tell us that he thought that they needed to take care of his constipation before we left. ???  If he's not bleeding internally, then constipation is something I can take care of at home.  Constipation isn't something that needs to be treated at a hospital, in my opinion, and with all of the medicines they kept giving him there, I'm pretty sure they caused the constipation.

As we had him there taking more medications to clean him out, he started to get more sick.  I could tell he was in a lot of pain and morphine wasn't working to ease it, and he started to get short of breath.  With the residents who were there, I probably saw 15 different doctors in the span of a few days.  We never had the same doctor twice.  I started to feel like I was playing a giant game of telephone with these people.  Each came in with a different version of what was going on with William according to what they had heard from a previous doctor. And instead of working together with a plan to help him get better, each new doctor came in with a new plan.  It was so frustrating to watch my son get worse and to see this mess of doctors who weren't doing a thing to help him.  Kevin called it a case of too many chiefs and not enough indians, and that's exactly what it was.  Not to mention that he was being starved since they couldn't decide whether or not they wanted him to have surgery, but they had to keep his belly empty just in case they decided at the last second to take him to the OR.  By Tuesday, after being there since Thursday night, I was angry and in tears.  I even had the thought that my son was going to die under the care of this incompetent hospital.  By then he was taking really short breaths, and his lungs and stomach were full of water.

They finally moved him back up to the pediatric ICU where he could get more intense treatment.  As soon as he was moved up there, his doctor noticed the amount of IV fluid he was getting and halved the amount saying, "He doesn't need that much fluid."  After about an hour, I could instantly see a difference in William.  He was breathing better and he was not in as much pain.  With the 15 doctors we saw downstairs, none of them noticed that they were giving him way too much IV fluid that was filling his lungs to the point where he couldn't breath.  And the saddest part of this is that Kevin mentioned to one of his nurses that she should stop the IV (this was when they were letting him eat).  Obviously she ignored him.

As soon as he was stable in the ICU, they asked if we wanted him moved back down to general pediatrics where we had been.  We said no.  He was discharged directly from the ICU a day later.

I will never go to Sunrise ever again.  I could probably even sue them for malpractice if I wanted to, but I'm just going to stay away from there and tell my friends to do the same.  I was prepared to drive to St. George next time I need hospital care for my kids, but two friends have told me that Summerlin has a wonderful children's hospital, so we will go the next time.

on his way home after being in the hospital for a week

I'm glad this is over, and my William is home. Hopefully we won't have to deal with hospitals again any time soon.