Withdrawal

Last Sunday {the day after Wyatt came home} Wyatt had one of his bad days. He cried a lot and was really irritable. After a little while of this I sent Jared to get some baby Tylenol because he appeared to be in some pain. It settled him enough that he was able to sleep for a little bit, but not long. Throughout the day he continued to be increasingly irritable. He was twitching a lot more than he usually does, had diarrhea, it was difficult getting him to focus on eating and was really upset while he was eating, and he was sneezing a lot which I thought was odd {I thought, maybe he's allergic to the cat?}. By nighttime Jared and I decided that this wasn't normal and decided to bring him to the ER by our house.

The dr. that looked at him there said that Wyatt did appear to have withdrawal symptoms and prescribed him more methadone. I don't remember what the dr. told me but I left with the impression that he was going to go through withdrawal from the methadone whenever he came off of it. That being said I thought to myself, okay, so he can either just go through this now, or in 4 days... I'm not delaying the inevitable. So I didn't fill the prescription.

Monday was a pretty hard day for Wyatt. It was still a challenge to get him to eat, but he did eat. He cried a butt ton, but he still took a nap here and there.

Monday night I slept on the couch next to him. The only way he would sleep was with skin to skin contact and he didn't sleep very well.. maybe 30 minutes every 3 hours, if that.

Tuesday Wyatt seemed to improve a little bit with his feeding. He still cried a lot and had lots of twitching, but it didn't seem to be quite as bad as it was the day before.

I spent the night on the couch with him again.

Wednesday was bad. His eating started to go down the crapper around 6 am. He wasn't interested in eating at all and was constantly crying. It took forEVER to console the little guy. Thank goodness my in-laws live next door! They came over and held him for awhile and tried to console him {which gave us a much needed break!} I decided that just Tylenol wasn't cutting it anymore and started giving him Tylenol and Ibuprofen around the clock.

By the time night came around Wyatt had been awake pretty much all day long crying. About 2 in the morning he was so wiped out that he finally fell asleep on my chest and he actually slept for about an hour and a half.

On Thursday Wyatt would only eat 9-20 mL of food each time I tried feeding him before he would freak out. There were times that we couldn't pick him up because it seemed to hurt him. By noon it appeared that the increased medication wasn't doing anything to help Wyatt. He had his followup appt that day so I told Jared that as soon as he got home we were going to go, I didn't care if we were early. Because he was eating so poorly, he wasn't peeing as much. He had a couple of dry diapers, and when I changed him at noon it looked like there was a tiny bit of blood in the diaper. {!!!}

Wyatt cried the whole way over and when we arrived at the appt an hour early, they took one look at Wyatt and we only had to wait about 10 minutes before we were in.

I told the dr. that I felt Wyatt needed to be re-admitted to the hospital for the methadone withdrawal. He wasn't eating well so I was worried about his health and the blood in his diaper also had me very concerned. Luckily I was smart enough to chart his eating ever since he had left the hospital so I was able to show her exactly when and how much he had been eating during the week, and I also wrote down every time I gave him medicine. After she assessed him and they tested his diaper for blood {which tested positive} she agreed with me that he needed to be back in the hospital.

She walked us over to the ER so that we could be admitted and after a few hours a room was finally ready for Wyatt. I requested that he be put in the same section he was in before since the nurses there were familiar with him and I'm grateful that they were able to comply with that request.

They gave him morphine to treat his withdrawal symptoms and after 12 hours of being awake, my little guy finally fell asleep.

He had one rough week. :(

They started him back on the methadone at 6 am Friday morning and he pretty much went back to his normal self... except he's eating way better. I think he's eating better because he knows what it feels like to be really hungry and now he's happy to eat.

I met with the pain team who is going to be following Wyatt while he is here and coming up with a new plan to get him off the methadone. I was able to show one of the dr.'s what Wyatt looked like while he was at home because I took a little video of him in case someone needed to see it after he had been put back on medicine. {I'm sooo glad I did that!}

Saturday day was also pretty good for Wyatt, but last night and this morning he went back to lots of crying and twitching and had to be given extra doses of morphine and Tylenol to manage the pain and make him comfortable again.

The attending thinks that there is more going on here than just withdrawal symptoms, he thinks that Wyatt is experiencing pain as well {and I agree}. They're going to be doing an x-ray to see if there's maybe a hairline fracture in one of his bones, then they're going to check his eyes to see if there's a scratch on his cornea, they'll possibly treat him with antibiotics in case he has an infection and then go from there.

We all feel that Wyatt's threshold for pain has been lowered with him being on pain meds for so long. Once we find a happy place for him to be in with the meds, they will be weened over a really long time so that he not only doesn't experience withdrawal symptoms again, but so he can slowly get used to what his skin feels like.

I'm not sure how long he'll be in the hospital this go round, but it looks like it'll be at least a week. I don't care how long he needs to be here... I just don't want him to hurt anymore.