On a fateful day in December we got a phone call that Liam had stopped breathing and EMS was on its way. This is when our nightmare began. I dropped everything and jumped in my truck to make the 30 minute ride to Hurley Hospital in a mere 12 minutes. On the way I called my husband. He had to drive all the way from Wixom to Flint. At first we had no idea what caused Liam to stop breathing. The ER doctor initially led us to believe that maybe our son had something blocking his airway, they were going to conduct a chest x-ray. We were finally able to go into the emergency room to see Liam. I couldn’t tell you how long we had to wait. For us it seemed like an eternity waiting to see him and to make sure he was OK. When we saw him, his eyes were swollen shut, he had been put on a ventilator, was hooked up to monitors and had several PIC lines. They were in the process of sedating him. At that point one of the doctors led us over to a CT scan. He explained that Liam had suffered a traumatic brain injury.
As soon as they had him stable enough Liam was moved from the ER to the pediatric ICU. They had to keep him in an induced coma by using several sedatives, a paralytic and pain killers. They needed to keep him as quiet as possible to minimize his brain pressure. A bolt called an Intracranial Pressure Monitor (ICP) was placed in his head to monitor the internal pressures of his brain. For days Liam had a 24 hour a day nurse that didn’t move more than a few feet from his bedside. She and a team of doctors constantly adjusted his medication to keep him properly sedated and his intracranial pressure low.
Eight days later when the intracranial pressure had lowered, the doctors removed Liam’s ICP monitor. This is the first time we got to hold him since he was admitted into the hospital.
The following day they stopped all sedatives and took him off the ventilator and put him on an assisted breathing device called a CPAP. The CPAP was removed later that day when he had a bad reaction to it. Fourteen days later they had removed all of Liam’s PIC lines. The following day Liam took it upon himself to pull out his NG tube (feeding tube). After nineteen days in the hospital Liam got to go home. The doctors decided that the danger of germs and infection was too great.
More Hospital Photos:
Liam is off of the ventilator, but still on oxygen and feeding tube. He has left hemiparesis i.e. he has left sided paralysis. He is blind in these photos, not even reacting to light. He cannot hold his head up. Liam is 8 months old here.
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