Last night I got all geared up to give Wilhelmina a sponge bath…

and when I say all geared up, I mean it… besides washing her with a cloth when she is dirty on a regular basis, about once a week I do the big clean up. I take her bandages off, I clean up the site where her Nephrostomy tube goes in, clean the glue off her skin and off the tubes, put fresh new bandages on and then clean her all over including her hair…

So, as I started to take the main bandage off I noticed something weird… a bit of the crust that usually accumulates around the wound was near the bottom of the bandage and there was evidence of a yellowish fluid that had dried on the inside of the bandage itself and then I noticed that the sutures that had been holding the tube near the skin were about 2 inches out and near the bottom of the bandage. I took a breath and touched the sutures to see if they would just slide back up the tube but when I did, it was the tube that slipped back into her body slightly. Not a good sign…

I had been told repeatedly that a nephrostomy tube was one of the hardest ones to deal with and that if it comes out it is an automatic ER visit and another one would need to be inserted… So when I saw that it was no longer in the way it should be, and had complete freedom of movement in and out, I knew I had to call..

I quickly bandaged it up so that nothing would move again and called the hospital to talk to the Urologist on call and within minutes I was on the phone with him explaining the situation…

So… at 8:30, we got ready and Wilhelmina and I left for the ER.

We got there at about 10pm and went to pre-triage and she was given the code P2 which is the highest priority you can get without being in need of resuscitation… that meant that we were able to go through the ER process quickly. I don’t think that her case was really as urgent as they classified her but because we didn’t actually have to see a doctor in the ER and just needed a place to wait for the on call urologist, I think that it was the easiest way to do so. After waiting a bit in the ER the Urology resident finally arrived. I found him a bit rough but he was nice, I just have a feeling that he is not used to working with kids much yet.

Nephrostomy tube in...

As I had observed, the tube was moving freely and had slipped out about 2 inches but was still functioning well. He was able to push it back into place and then sutured the tube so that it no longer could move… not to her skin, but to the rubbery plastic layer that is just over the incision. She usually is quiet and still when we are touching her bandages but I have the feeling that his roughness, not being mean but just a bit too hurried, and the fact that it most likely hurt when he pushed it back in, made the experience quite unpleasant for her.

 

We were able to leave right after and at 12:30am I got back on the road to drive the nearly 100km home…

Tomorrow we are heading back to the hospital to meet up with the head Urologist and make sure that everything is OK…

just 20 days left…