We were trying to come up with activities to do with Alex to get him out of the house(and away from video games) but still would be socially distancing and safer. I came across a trail ride and thought what better way to spend some time in Texas than riding horses. Alex has always expressed an interest in riding, and why not. The boys went on this adventure without me, it was a two hour ride, the only downside was that it was in August I think in Houston….. so it was melty hot.
Mark and Alex had a good time, Alex was a little less commanding than his horse needed- so sometimes he stopped to eat grass. Alex had such a good time though that we were discussing doing it again, or letting him take the horseback riding after school program.
It’s actually kind of amazing to me that this kid used to fit on the ponies back at the Montrose Farmer’s Market
They had a great time and Alex is always asking when he can go ride horses again. They even bought a bag of carrots to feed to their rides after returning to home base.
In very traditional riding gear of track pants and sneakers– but it was Texas and he had already outgrown the jeans we had brought from China.
Playing Red light green Light with his cousin and Uncle Mark- Alex had never played that as it isn’t a game here in China, but he had a blast with it and talked of bringing it back to his friends at school. He got to spend a lot of time with his cousin (who was in our bubble), which is great because he hasn’t had a lot of extended family visits since our move abroad.
And now to the down part of the story…. most of you will have heard about this, or at least what I was able to tell at the time.
Alex woke up one morning not feeling well, after not eating much the night before at dinner and looking a little ragged. I didn’t think much of it and told him to take it easy and rest for the day, no going outside with his friends. Then he started limping around the house, he hadn’t fallen, or banged himself on anything- he just said his leg hurt.
Mark will be the first to make fun of me about my google Doctorate, which oftens leads me to conclude that I’ve got the worst diseases( admittedly, the phd work in diseases isn’t helping) but this time it really helped us. I googled 10yr old boy, fever and hip pain. The results were pretty conclusive that is would be Toxic synovitis, a not uncommon reaction to an illness- more common in boys than girls, and it’s a hip inflammation that makes it hard to walk. The list also included several much worse case scenarios so we thought it would be good to take him to Urgent Care since we had the fancy traveller’s insurance.
By the time we got to Urgent Care at Texas Children’s Hospital, the poor kid could hardly shuffle his feet along so we had to find him a wheelchair and his fever was so high he was shivering in the doctor’s office. We had a lovely young doctor who agreed with me that it was probably just synovitis, but they’d have to do an ultrasound to be sure and they couldn’t do that at the Urgent Care- so she sent us across the way to the Emergency Room.
Because of Covid, they would only let one parent back at a time- and since I had done more medical visits with Alex and know his history a bit better, I went back with him first while Mark had to wait in the waiting room. We got a terrific nurse named Brandon, who had the toughest time getting an iv in Alex because at this point he was super dehydrated. Alex got to watch them use a small ultrasound to help Brandon find the veins and thought that was kind of cool…. as much as he could at that point, he was pretty miserable.
He kept asking for a drink, but they wouldn’t let him because they wanted to rule out surgery first. So we wheeled down to the ultra sound, and a couple x-rays. All the people that we dealt with there were really nice, the nurses and techs, really everyone.
We got back to the room,and I went out to switch with Mark and update him on everything. He brought a game to play with Alex and I went to wait. Things get a little blurry here because I wasn’t in the room and I think I’ve blocked some things out. We got sent home after collecting some blood samples and told to have him rest and relax.
The idea was that it was toxis synovitis and it would go away on its own. We got him home, got him comfortable on the couch and kind of went about our day thinking we were so lucky. He didn’t eat much, and we were mostly just focused on keeping him hydrated.
The next day, I went off to Target for gatorades and a new switch controller for him because his was glitchy and we needed him to stay still and rest . I was on the phone with my mom, telling her about this horrible day, sitting in my car at target, before going in, and the hospital calls telling us to bring him back in, and to pack a bag because we would be staying.
My heart just dropped. The results of the blood culture they took the day before came back and that’s all the nurse would tell me. I asked, do I need to bring him right away? and she said they’d be waiting for us and to pack something for me too. I raced back home, told Mark and amidst complete panic and racing around to pack, trying to tell Alex everything would be ok.
When we got to the hospital, Alex was super brave, not worried, just irritated that he had to come back in, get another IV (with another ultrasound because the resident couldn’t find his veins) and he was so tired. Mark still had to wait outside until but now they had shut down the waiting room too so he had to wait outside the hospital. A nice lady ( I can’t remember her job title, kid specialist?) came by and tried to get Alex talking and interested in something, she asked what he liked to do and he said board games, she said she’d try to find something.
He was wearing a shirt from my mom, that has a metro line map over a dinosaur
And I don’t know if she couldn’t see it, trying to be funny or whatever, but she asked him if that was a map of somewhere he had travelled. My super sick kid rolled his eyes and said it’s a dinosaur, not a real metro.
At this point we’re still in the ER, and have been for about 4 or 5 hours, Alex needed a covid test before they would admit him and while they were waiting they took some blood and sent him off for an MRI on his hip. We weren’t getting a lot of information at this point, but we knew that the blood cultures had come back showing a big infection and they were worried about it being a bone infection in his hip causing the problem.
Around 11:30-midnight they finally admitted him and Mark could join us and go upstairs to Alex’s room. He was so miserable and tired, but he hurt too much to sleep- he just kept crying and those of you who know him, that’s just not like him. They gave him ibuprofen for the fever and told him to rest.
Mark and I slept on a fold out couch in the room, and kept track of when the nurses came in, what they gave him-how he reacted. He was doing this weird thing where they would give him ibprofen or tylenol for the fever and then the fever would spike higher than it was before they gave it do him. And no one seemed concerned about that but me and Mark– the doctor just said, hmm that’s weird.
The child specialist came back and asked if he’d like the video game guy to come visit with some games to play, or would he like a visit from the therapy dog. He said both, but he wasn’t really that invested. I think we had Teen Titans playing almost constantly in his room, and Mark and I were just trying to stay calm and keep Alex calm. It is a terrible feeling when your child is hurting and you can’t do anything to make it better.
Poor Mark still had to teach class during this week too, so he had to leave to go home and teach and then come back. And as the week went on and we weren’t seeing much improvement, Alex started realizing he wasn’t going to get to go trick or treating. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and Alex loves it too, and he was really looking forward to going trick or treating with his friends/cousin since we don’t really do that here in China. The second day, the doctors came to tell us that Alex had a blood infection and that they think the hip pain is a seperate issue or just the way that the infection was presenting itself.
They started him on a generic antibiotic and ran more cultures to see which antibiotic would be best for fighting the infection. They were very careful with us not to use certain words (like sepsis, or MRSA) but between my google doctorate and my real phd work, I knew what we were all talking about.
We started to have peaks and valleys, sometimes he would seem like he was getting better, and then he’d tank again, nights were hard, and I think he ate one meal the whole time we were there. He kept pulling the ivs when he slept, so the alarms on the machine would sound. By the end of day 2 I knew how to turn them off or pause them until the nurse came in.
This was the most up he was the whole day, when the therapy dog Pluto came to visit – in all honesty this was the most up Mark was too- Pluto worked wonders for him too. Day 3 was a turning point, and the good times were really good, he started building the legos my mom sent, even getting up a walking around a little bit. Day 3 they started him on targeted antibiotics and things started improving, except that now there was vomiting. It just felt like the poor kid couldn’t get a break.
Here he is, Day 3, building legos trying to smile for Grandma. I went home for the first time on day 3 to have a real shower and grab clothes and food for me and Mark before coming back. Mark sends me a message asking where I am as I had been gone for a bit, and I asked was everything ok, and his response was “you’ll see when you get back” I was sure that something was really wrong and he didn’t want to tell me over the phone, so I finished paying and raced back. When I got back, Alex was up walking around, no limping, they had toured the recreation area one floor up, he was doing so much better. He borrowed Mark’s jacket (because he didn’t want his butt hanging out) and walked over to the family dining area and ate a little bit of dinner with us.
We had so many gifts from friends and family, my mom sent him legos to build, one of my best friends sent him a new video game, another sent him mini cupcakes, we ad people offering to send us dinner from across the country, my cousin heard he wouldn’t be able to go out trick or treating so he came to the hospital with a big bag of candy so Alex wouldn’t miss out. The outpouring of love he got was so overwhelming, it was so touching at such a really low point.
The child specialist told him that he could dress in his costume the next day (Oct 31- Halloween) and there would be a little dog parade and reverse trick or treating. So we brought his Luke Skywalker era x-wing pilot costume – not to be confused with the new Poe Dameron era x-wing pilot costume, so that he could trick or treat at the hospital.
The therapy dogs, 4 of them all named after planets, so Pluto the planet not Pluto the dog, were dressed as hand sanitizers. And they rolled a little booth with non candy goodies for the kids to collect and “trick or treat” from.
Alex was excited, and his doctors were dressed up like the Space Jam Bugs Bunny characters and got into Halloween too.
The lady in the tutu is the child specialist. She even got Alex a board game he could keep (that also came back to China with us).
And then we got the best news, he could go home! So 4 days in the hospital, oral antibiotics for the next two weeks and a follow up, but he was allowed to go home and they even cleared him for real Trick or Treating. He got a stuffed dog wearing a Texas Children’s Hospital tshirt too when he got released.
My mom and stepdad got him this cool mustang planter with a cactus- it coud not come back to China with us, but it found a really good home before we left.
Alex got to go out with his friend Rylan, they knew the best area for trick or treating, and we told him as soon as he was tired, we would take him home. He made it about 3 times as far as I thought he would before he was too tired to keep going.
Rylan dressed up as a Plague Doctor, and Alex as Luke Skywalker
They had an impressive haul of candy, and you wouldn’t think to look at him here that he was so very sick the days before.
Maybe you can see a bit around his eyes how tired he was. All in all, we were lucky to be somewhere like Houston with such a good children’s hospital right there, and lucky that we had gotten the traveller’s insurance as our total bill for the 4 day stay, and two ER visits was just about $38,000. We paid a total of $300 and the insurance paid the rest.
And in the end, there’s no real reason why this happened to him, they don’t know how he got sick, we were lucky it wasn’t MRSA but that it was treatable with antibiotics.
Writing about this, even almost a whole year later is really hard– this kid and his dad are my everything and when I think about how sick he was and how lucky we went to the ER when we did… and also, to the love of my life, who was so busy being a rock for me and for Alex- you are irreplacable and I wouldn’t want to be doing this adventure with anyone but you.
Traveling Expat Family 