Happy Ending

On Friday afternoon around 4 PM we got a horrible phone call from a social worker at St. Pauls hospital in Vancouver. She said our son had been admitted with a severe anaphylactic reaction to something he ate. The Doctor said he was in the Intensive care unit and they were trying to open his lungs so he could start breathing by himself. Feeling terrified, we flung stuff into a suitcase and rushed to the airport.

When we arrived at the hospital his nurse came out to greet us she said they had just taken him off a big machine that was used to heavily sedate him. She took us over to the bed where he was lying. He had a tube down his throat to open his airway. He was hooked up to a respirator. There was at least a dozen IV bags dripping fluid into his veins and the standard ECG monitor. He looked awful.

Just writing this makes me shudder to think what could have happened to him because he did start breathing on his own. In baby steps, as the nurse said, they took out the airway, unhooked the respirator and started decreasing the steroids in the IV’s. When he eventually came out of the fog and was alert enough to start remembering what happened he said a women at work had given him a cupcake. It was the end off the day so he ate it and went to catch the bus home. By the time he got to the bus stop he knew something was wrong so he turned around to go to the hospital. He said he had one breath left so he used his cell phone to dial 911 He was really upset because after explaining what was wrong with him and where he was to whoever answered they kept talking to him but he couldn’t respond. It annoyed him. He remembers falling and that was it.

We heard from the doctor that the paramedics did CPR on him for two minutes. All the nurses and doctors, his friends and us are happy and relived that he made it, that he is alive, suffering no after affects and pissed off because he is not allowed to leave the hospital yet.