Stroke. When you are told your son has had one your brain does funny things with the information, and I mean besides the wanting to cry and vomit it conjures strange images of what you know of what that word usually means for someone that has had one. But let me back up a few steps as its been a few days since we posted. Archers head shape was looking better and better as the swelling started to come down and he was more and more his old self. We even had some frozen yogurt with cousin Louis, it was about this point that we started to notice his eyes were a little wider than we remember and he had a bit of a “deer in the headlights” kind of expression on his little face but we sort of just put it down to what he had been through. Later that night we started to get a little more concerned as they seemed to get wider. Our fantastic nurse also noticed it and said if we were worried about it she was happy to make some calls. Rather quickly we seen a doctor who also thought it kind of out of the ordinary and got him some pain medication to see if it was just a reflex to being in some discomfort. After seeing him again at about 9:30 and nothing had changed he made the call and probably woke some people up. A short time later we were down getting a CT scan with a room filled with doctors from his Neurosurgery and Plastics teams. Archer was his usual brave little self and everyone was amazed he sat still long enough for the scans. After the scan some more people were woken up and the obvious things like a bleed related to the surgery or his newly positioned skull bones having moved were ruled out. We were then booked for an MRI for the morning. We ended up not getting into the MRI till about 12 the next day, and as you can imagine a 10 month old fasting since 2am Archer was rather cranky but held up better than us. The scan took about and hour and as he had to go under general anesthetic it was another nerve racking wait for us. As I mentioned above the results of this scan dropped the floor out from under us. It showed that Archer had had a stroke. This is what was affecting his eyes and giving him the inability to look in the upward direction. At this point we had everyone involved in his case looking for an answer as to the source and the reason this could have happened. There theories seemed to revolve around either arterial damage and/or the clot crossing over from a hole in his heart. At this point I will “long story short”. We had another MRI that focused on the arteries in that neck, and a ultrasound of the heart and a bubble study. The results of these also showed no reason or source of where the clot could have came from. The Royal Childrens Hospital has some amazing minds that all looked at this and could not find a link between his surgery and where this clot ended up. You know that list of bad things that can happen they read out to you before a surgery but you don’t think it will ever actually happen? Unfortunately they sometimes do and some times your that one in a million person something like this can happen to and there sometimes just really is no explainable reason. So Archers journey will end up being a lot longer than we first thought. Doctors who know a lot about these things seem pretty confident this is something that will just fix itself, or improve. But when dealing with the brain they cant really give a definite answer or time frame and months or years is more likely than days or weeks. In life you are always thrown curve balls and we are sure Archer will just take it in his stride and continue to thrive and grow as the strong, brave amazing little man he already is.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 12:27:48 +0000
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