Ped's ICU

Yesterday, Rowan and Nadine wanted to watch TV in my bed so I let them. I went to go start making some lunch and Rowan dumped out my laundry, turned the basket upside down in front of the bathroom sink, put a paint can on top of it and climb up to the top shelf of the medicine cabinet. While there he ate the remainder of a bottle of children's chewable tylenol. When they were sick before, we ran out of tylenol and had bought a new bottle. They used maybe 5 or 6 of them and the others were left. It was a bottle of 30. I immediately called our doctor and he said take him to the ER immediately. So I did.

We went to St. Charles, it was packed, however, they took him back immediately. He had a tube stuck down his nose and his stomach pumped through it. They also tried to put charcoal in his stomach through that tube, but it just exploded all over everything and everyone in the room. It wouldn't go down the tube. So they amazingly got Rowan to drink it inside chocolate milk. Rowan was bussed to Toledo Hospital Pediatric ICU. They had to wait until the 4 hour mark to do more blood work. At that point his tylenol levels were low and there was no need for further treatment just observation. So he and I stayed the night.

The Doctor's there do not think that he ate as much as we know he did. However, they also think that since we got him to the hospital immediately and within an hour of taking it, his stomach had been pumped and the charcoal put in, so those things may have kept the tylenol from getting into his system in a toxic dose. Regardless, God protected him!

Standard procedure with any accidental overdose is to call in a social worker. So before he could be released we had to see one. They come in and ask questions and then give advice. Now that we know Rowan will climb specifically to get medicine, I believe we are going to put it out in the garage in daddy's gun safe.

One other thing happened while at the hospital, 3 times during the night Rowan set off the apnea alarms. He was connected to all the life-stat monitors the whole time he was there. The nurse attributed it to him moving around and them loosing the signal. However, he wasn't moving around. I explained what we had gone through before with him and our suspicions of sleep apnea and she said to definitely talk to our primary care and have a sleep study done. We had experienced this before and our doctor said to just watch him. And if it happened again to call 911. Well, he doesn't always sleep with us and it's possible that he's not doing it every night. I am going to call our doctor tomorrow and see what he says.