Day 29, 30, 31 and 32

Our latest adventure - a visit to Monreal's Children's Hospital. Carly was admitted Monday night with severe dehydration. She had a gastro-bug since Saturday morning and could not keep anything - even liquids down. She was placed on fluids for 2 days and then monitored yesterday. We were discharged once she was able to demonstrate that she could keep liquids down. Now we are working on eating...it's slow going. She doesn't feel like eating anything - even her most favorite foods. Today's mini lunch (one roll and about 4 grapes) was the first meal she has been willing to eat in 5 days. She stayed on the couch all morning - but did some water play with Maggie after lunch - mainly just sitting and watching Maggie - but it was nice to see them interact again.





Carly was not a fan of the hospital - especially the IV. She was too dehydrated for them to put it in her hand - so they had to imobolize her entire right arm....Carly called it her cast. She started to seem like herself again once they removed the IV on Wednesday morning.

Carly was admitted to what they call a "Short Stay Unit" - do we have those in the US? It was a large room with 9-10 other patients - each patient had a hospital bed , one fold out bed/chair, and a TV that looked about 50 years old. The screen was only 6 inches big but the TV itself was probably three times that size. It was kind of like the one we had in our kitchen growing up. Our "room" was tiny - I had to leave the area when the doctors entered so that they could stand next to the bed - but we were lucky because we had two walls with a curtain pulled about halfway across the front of our area - many of the patients only had curtains for privacy. The nurses station was in the center of the room - there was no patient confidentiality - The doctors discussed the cases at the nurses desk or in the kitchen that we all shared, too. Carly had three doctors following her - since it was a teaching hospital - which was kind of nice because they were extremely thorough since each doctor did a history, bedside exam, etc. Looked like they were charting by hand - I didn't see any use of computers. I was very surprised how outdated the set up felt since we were in such a large city. I'm not sure this was the standard care - maybe just where they treated the foreigners!

Hopefully, our tour of the health care system is over. I think Carly and I have seen enough of the hospital for this Canada visit.