The plan was to give the new meds 4-5 days to work and then have a heart cath to check the pressures and get better images of his heart. If all looked well we would switch from IV only meds to oral medication and go home to work out a plan forward and see if surgery was still on the table.
Well day 5 Isaac spiked a fever and looked and felt very sick. Isaac has a special IV line called a PICC that runs up near his heart, and those lines can get infected, which is dangerous for a kid like him. So the team didn’t wait around. They drew blood cultures from two different spots to find out whether the line was the source, and started antibiotics to cover him while the cultures grew. Those couple of days were hard, it seemed to us and the docs that infection was the most likely cause giving timing and the sudden onset.
It turned out to be a simple virus though. The blood cultures stayed clean, the line wasn’t infected, and they stopped the antibiotics.
This pushed the cath procedure back another week though.