Emergency Starship picu hospitalization
Helping support Bowden recover after a very serious illness and stay in the PICU at Starship.
Te Puke, Bay Of Plenty
Bowden (aged 7) was flown to starship on the 27th December after spending the previous 2 days in Tauranga hospital.
It started as a sore, potentially fractured, foot, then they thought about an infection in the joint, then sepsis, then Kawasaki disease and the latest thought is that he has Lupus.
Lupus is a chronic autoimmune condition that affects children differently to adults. This is something that will have to be managed for life. This will take a while to figure out what works best and how severely it has affected him. He will be needing multiple specialist visits over the next short while until we can keep things under control.
Rebecca Watkinson's involvement (page creator)
I'm Bowdens Mum and the person here with him in Starship.
Use of funds
Support while we are in Auckland, aftercare when he is released and maybe something special for him when he is finally stable.
Latest update
Going downhill 4 January 2022
So today has been a pretty shit one.
Once Bowden was transferred to the ward yesterday he started to deteriorate again. He need more and more oxygen. He also had some pretty intense bruising that had appeared before we left PICU to go to the ward. It got s lot worse so the surgeons on call asked for an urgent CT. We were expecting him to probably need urgent surgery so Daniel raced back to Auckland at 1 in the morning. Luckily so far he hasn't needed surgery but he is being closely monitored. Daniel has spent most of the daylight hours with him today as I was going on about 36hours awake.
This afternoon the call was made to send him back to PICU because he was needing more and more oxygen to help with his breathing. We got him settled and spent some time there with him. They put him on high flow oxygen. Just as we were about to get into the car the team called and told us he would need to be put back onto a ventilator. So we raced back up to sit with him while they did that. I'm glad we did because he definitely looked a bit worried and scared.
We will see what tomorrow brings but it looks like we'll definitely be here for a decent chunk of January.
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