from arrival to admission

Ford did alright on the flight back to Vancouver. It was a little awkward getting him and all his medications and bags through security, but was more or less uneventful. He was supplied with oxygen for the flight and slept most of the way.

We took him to the cardiac clinic at Children's hospital on Monday to check in and let them have a look at him (a 5 hour look), and then had a quiet evening at home. Everything seemed ok.

This morning we got a call from the cardiac nurse saying that she and Dr. Human had been rethinking some of the test results they got for Ford, primarily the chest x-ray, which showed some fluid building up around his left lung. Since he'd had a restless night, sounded a little congested, and was working a bit harder to breath, we decided to bring him in to be monitored for a couple of days thinking he might need a little extra help getting rid of the accumulating fluid.

So we wound up back in the ICU this afternoon, where Ford promptly nose-dived, with his sats dropping to the 40s, his respiratory rate climbing to 110, and his head getting purpler and purpler. They decided to repeat the chest x-ray, gave him an echo and an ECG, mulled the possibility of putting a drainage tube into his chest, ordered a CT scan for tomorrow morning to check for any new or old clots that could be blocking up his circulation, and intubated him - "to make things easier for him."

He's back on morphine, back on midazolam, back on rocuronium, back on a breathing machine, and back in nearly the exact situation he left Vancouver in 6 weeks ago, sparking his team here to mutter more than a few acerbic remarks on the quality of care he received in Toronto, like "Why did we send him on a 10, 000km trip to get a G-tube and a few diruetics?"