A quick update on Alison:
Alison was allowed to return home on Friday afternoon. She was packed off with a bunch of dressings and some instructions on how to remove them each day, have a shower and then re-apply new dressings.
Saturday went quite well – although the site of her open wounds was pretty horrible – a lot of the burns have blistered and are oozing liquid continuously. Although she was still in quite a bit of pain, I was surprised at how well she coped.
Sunday wasn’t as good – Alison wakened up feeling ill and the burns seemed to be hurting a lot more. She removed the dressings, showered and then decided to call the hospital to check she was doing everything correctly as she was running out of dressings already. It seemed like we came away with loads of the dressings but she was using 7 or 8 of the 10cm x 10cm dressing each day, and even they were leaking. The nurse on the end of the phone came back with different advice – don’t change the dressings for three or four days – so this upset Alison as it went against what the doctor had told her. Anyway, she dressed the blisters again and I went on the hunt for more dressings. After a few visits, I ended up back at the Royal Berks, they managed to find a few alterative dressings – but only 5 of them.
So today we returned to Stoke Mandeville to speak to the experts in the burns unit there and to ask for more dressings. Funnily enough we spoke to the nurse that we had spoken to on the phone yesterday but also a couple of doctors. They agreed that Alison should keep the dressings on for up to 5 days as long as they do not leak. They also gave us some bigger dressings to try and make sure that they will not leak.
This sounds like a better approach as removing the dressings is very sore and it rips off skin from the wounds.
Alison coped with it all well and I think she is much happier now.
As for Alexander – he has been a wee star through all of this. We actually had a visit from our two speech and language therapists this morning (one from the cochlear implant centre – Julie, and the other our local therapist – Louise). The session with Alexander went well. Julie certainly saw a difference in him and he performed pretty well for them. So all good news there.
We confirmed with Julie that we wanted her to pursue the funding for an implant in the second ear. We have not yet decided to go ahead with it – but we feel that we should get all our ducks lined up in advance as we know how long it can take. She also told us that theatre time is getting hard to come by as preference is being given to deaf children with no implants that need them and most of these will now be getting both sides done at the same time, following the recent NICE ruling.