“It’s just a tummy bug.” No it wasn’t.
Saved by one paramedic and two great hospitals.
Don’t worry; this has a happy ending.
Short version; when Alex was four, he got ill during a UK holiday. He bounced around GP surgeries and a hospital over the course of a week, with little clue as to why he was so sick with fever and breathing difficulties. Blessedly, an astute Paramedic noticed his collapsed lung during a night-time callout. Returning to our local hospital, he was diagnosed with a horribly advanced bacterial pneumonia which had created a large abscess on his left lung.
What followed was three-weeks of parental hell and bedside-pacing. At one point Alex had been given every possible medication, and options were running low.
He was rushed from Warwick Hospital to Birmingham Children’s Hospital and prepared for surgery to remove sections of his lung. With hours to go before surgery, his responsiveness and outlook improved, and the surgical team decided to wait and watch for 24-hours.
Miraculously he continued to improve on the antibiotic treatments alone and within a week was home and recuperating.
One of the most traumatic experiences, for Alex and for ourselves, was him being held down for IV-line and cannula fittings. He probably had around ten during the period and its immediate aftermath.
Each episode was a 40 to 60-minute drama of chasing him around the room until 3-5 adults managed to restrain him long enough to tackle the procedure. These highly stressful encounters meant the first attempts never worked; veins blew, blood refused to flow, topical numbing creams failed, options ran dry.
Traumatic cannulation is what all of us remember most from this difficult chapter.
In the calmer days that followed, Alex’s Dad Stuart, an experienced medical design engineer, conceived the idea to use virtual-reality to develop a distraction game that could help reduce child anxiety and promote hand-stillness. Several healthy, happy family years on, this ambition to create a distraction game for ‘when it matters most’ has come to fruition.
Stuart’s ambition remains to equip all UK hospitals with access to the system.
See, we told you there was a happy-ending.
Alex, now aged nine. Tall, strong, active and happy.
No idea how we will EVER get him back into a hospital phlebotomy room if the need arises.