Moses

Amecet (the baby shelter) has been a little busy lately and their solo nurse had had a lot on her plate so I’ve been trying to provide help where I could. Consequently I’ve been around the place a lot in the past week. They have one little guy, Moses, who has not been doing well at all. Yesterday morning he was dehydrated and clearly painful. He was, fussing continuously, grunting with each breath and not keeping anything down. He has had diarrhea for several days but it seemed to be getting worse. Yesterday they put in an IV, put down a feeding tube, started antibiotics (as a shot in the dark) and tried to rehydrate. I just stopped by this morning and his abdomen is rock hard and he is feverish. He is vomiting everything they put down his tube (including meds) and we are just not getting on top of his issues.

He is only a few weeks old so there just isn’t a lot of wiggle room to figure out what is going on.

I keep trying to mentally run a differential diagnosis but medicine is so blasted limited here. We need some lab work, stool cultures, some imaging and let’s face it, none of that is going to happen. This kid should be getting a stat surgical consult.  But I have to come to terms with the fact that if it is anything worse than a c-diff infection (and possibly even that!) there is nothing we can do for this little guy but keep him comfortable and let him go. Have I mentioned lately how much I hate nursing here?!