St Joseph's Ward and Ciara's first operation - 9th to 11th January

For anyone who's ever been to Our Lady's in Crumlin, the first thing they will tell you is that it looks a bit of a dump. We'd just come up from a shiny new paediatric ward at Portlaoise and in comparison Crumlin looked very gloomy. Lot's of faded pics of wonky looking Mickey Mouses and Mr T's. When Ciara was admitted to St Joseph's, Yvonne and I were feeling very down about being there but it wasn't long before we realised it was just a façade. It was soon obvious that the health care at Crumlin is second to none.

Ciara had been fasting since about 2pm in Portlaoise, as they thought they might need to operate on her in the Evening. Sure enough, she went to theatre at 9pm to have the fluid drained from her hip. The fluid showed signs of septic arthritis but no active bugs, and so had to be opened up cleaned out. She now has a very neat 2 inch scar as souvenir.

At this point we were under the impression that there was a relation between the Transitory Synovitis (irritable hip) and the Septic Arthritis but it was unknown what. I mentioned this in January 9th email:

Now the first problem with hips was the right hip on Christmas Day. This was Irritable Hip or Transitory Synovitus. This is like a cold that effects hips and the only treatment is rest and calpol etc to ease pain and keep temperature down. This normally clears up in about or week or so. And it would appear that it did. However the same root cause of the Irritable Hip in the left hip could have caused the septic arthritus in the right hip. We'll never know.

Her temperature shot up again that evening to over 39 degrees and so she was booked in for another load of blood tests the following day. It looked like she had a urinary tract infection in the tiny amount of wee she'd done and she hadn't pooed for days. At this point, we blamed the pain in her legs for putting her off wanting to go.

The following day she had her blood tests, an x-ray and ultrasound of her hips, and an x-ray of her chest for some reason that wasn't clear. Results came back negative for infection in the fluids from her hip and no sign of damage to the joints. She had some movement and was given an IV antibiotic to clear up an ear infection and she was monitored then to see if the other hip was going to play up.

Over the next couple of nights, Yvonne or I took it in turns to either sleep on the ward on a 1 inch floor mattress, or have a bed in the gloomy and depressing parents accommodation at Crumlin. We were just waiting for he temperature to stabilise now and to find out what was going on.