LJ and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Yesterday I got that call from LJ’s school.  You know, the one that makes you stop cold.  The “we need you to come to the school right. now.” call.  The one that sends you flying out of the house, forgetting to lock the door, screeching down the driveway without even looking behind you.

It seems that LJ had another fainting spell, this time at school.  Those of you who have followed me for a while may remember that this first started a few years ago and we had him worked up after the first incident with no real results.  We repeated the EEG last summer after another spell at a friend’s birthday party and again were told that nothing was wrong.

Well, something must be wrong because this is the fourth time this has happened.

LJ was in art class when he felt it coming on and alerted the teacher.  She walked him up to the office where they sat him in a chair and he passed out.  The school called me and dialed 911 and by the time I got there, the police were already there and LJ was sitting up looking pretty freaked out.  I had the staff lie him down with his feet up and the EMTs arrived around that time.

Kind of blurry – getting a good picture wasn’t really my top priority at the moment.

We decided to have him transported to Children’s Hospital by ambulance as the EMTs were concerned that he might have had a seizure based on the staff’s description of the whole event.

 I have to stop here and say what an AMAZING job the EMTs did with LJ.  They gave him a stuffed animal once he was in the ambulance and kept him entertained with demonstrations of their tablet computer.  He wasn’t the least bit scared as they made him feel completely safe and cared for.

Once we arrived at Children’s Hospital, LJ was put into a room in Emergency and was checked over right away.  His vitals were taken and he was generally “looked over” and seemed fine.  By now, the color had returned to his face and he was starting to warm up.  He sat quietly and watched TV while we waited for the doctors to tell us what the next step was.

Each doctor took a very detailed history of the previous events.  They checked his blood pressure and did an EKG to check his heart.  One doctor had him stand up and checked his BP in comparison to when he was laying down and did notice a difference.

We were given a referral to a pediatric cardiologist at Children’s (appointment on Tuesday) where they will do some more testing and hopefully find an answer for us.

We had arrived at 11:45 in the morning and they had us out by 2:30 pm.  I don’t know how much time all of you have spent in Emergency Rooms in the past, but I think that may be a record for me.  The staff was so kind and attentive and we definitely feel blessed to have a facility like Children’s Hospital in our backyard.  I know its ER has been rated highly in Parent’s Magazine, and I can see why.

We stopped and ate some food on the way home and within minutes, LJ was sick to his stomach.  I’m not sure if it was because he was so hungry and then ate too quickly, if it was the stress of the whole event, or if he’s fighting off a bug.  Either way, you can imagine that we watched him very carefully for the rest of the night.  I think he is pretty sick of me asking him how he’s doing and if he feels okay.  He’s being a trooper and not complaining about my incessant need to hug him.

I’ll feel much better when we have an answer to what exactly is going on.  Hopefully we’ll be able to make sure we don’t have another Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day again!

UPDATE: Because it’s not really fair not to tell you what we finally learned about LJ’s situation, here is a follow up post.