Rollercoaster

So the phone rings at 11:00am this morning. Just when we thought life was gaining some sort of normalcy, we were again reminded not to jump to conclusions!

It was Dr Herbert, stating that the State had called after hours last night and just "left a message" with the reception that Griffin's eye culture grew varicella virus. Yes, that's right - varicella (as in chicken pox/shingles virus). This made absolutely no sense - as none of the people he'd be exposed to had this, however varicella can cause encephalitis.

She had him come in to swab his mouth to try and confirm the varicella growth. It was confirmed with Oregon Medical Lab that this, when done STAT the report would be done in 3hrs. We got there at noon and did the swab, then Dr Pelinka came in to tell us that she spoke with a panel of pediatric neurologists yesterday (4 of them, in fact) who all were sitting around looking at Fin's MRI. They were all confused about the doom-and-gloom prognosis that Dr Goins had given us - because they were reading this as a pretty normal MRI. They reviewed the area Dr G was concerned the most about, but they were seeing it as a "normal process" of an inflamed brain from the infection process - and felt it was absolutely nothing to worry about. We have an appointment for consult in 4wks at OHSU with one of the pediatric neurologists reading the MRI.

Fin also had his echo today, being done for slight murmur noted yesterday in the office visit. The tech doing the echo said that he saw no abnormalities, though the definitive results would be ready Monday. It was reassuring to hear that there was no marked abnormalities.

So, I waited all day for a call regarding the repeat swab. At 7pm, Dr Herbert called saying she hadn't gotten the report and when she called to verify it, was told that the lab staff had already left and no one could help her. She paged the Head of the Lab, Head of Pathology and hadn't gotten a call back. She left me her home/cell/pager number as well as Dr Pelinka's #s stating that if Fin had any changes over the weekend to call them. About 15min later Dr Pelinka called me to voice her frustrations and assured me Monday morning she would be filing an incident report.

For now I'm going to go stare at him ... I'm so uneasy now not knowing what's going on and hoping his encephalitis doesn't recur. Oh - and we were given the Ok to decrease his phenobarbital dose by 1mg. Hey - it's a move downward!