Kari finally to get to hold her baby. This picture makes me cry. I can't imagine what she going through. She is one tuff cookie. I am going to post Talbey's story below. Please continue to pray for him.
.About Praying for the Lord's healing touch over Talbey Ahlum
Description Talbey Ahlum is in the PICU at Arkansas Children's Hospital. He is fighting for his life as he battles an infection that has taken over his 3 year old body. He is currently in a coma and on dialysis. Please stand with us in prayer as we ask God for a miracle. We trust that the Lord is holding Talbey right now and that He is going to heal him. Although this is such a confusing time, we know that Go...d works in mysterious ways. Please lift up the family over these next few hours and days, as the doctors try to figure out what is causing Talbey to be so sick.
The story, the time line;
**** Please note, My disclosure, I’m not a Dr., I’m not a writer, and I have not been perfectly focused as I have tried to explain some basics with detail. So read on and understand we have had quite the journey already and we are aware we have a much larger journey to go…
Starting from the beginning – tues morning, (Aug 23rd) Talbey woke in the morning hoping to go to pre-school but had a pretty good fever, around 101 degrees. So since Dad was staying home this day to work on the crafts, Kari went to her shop to start the set up for the Frisco Fest. After dad and Talb’s played some angry birds on the computer, and after some lunch Talbey fell asleep on the couch around noon. Around 3pm Dad had to wake Talbey to go pick up Gavin at Gavin’s School (Gav was on his 2nd week of Kindergarten). Talbey was feeling perfectly fine as after Dad and Gavin went to Walmart to grab a few things for snacks and dinner for the evening. Once home Gav and Talb played some more angry birds, and watch their new favorite movie Rio (super cute movie by the way) and during the movie Talbey mentioned he was tired again, so he took a nap for the second time of the day, this was a sign that he was not feeling so good, as he love to play with his bros. Once Kari got home from the shop around 6:30pm, she jumped on Dad because she said “did you know he had such a large fever”, and because he fell asleep and didn’t have a fever, the answer was no, but Kari was concerned because it was around 103 or 104. Kari proceeded to contact the local walk in clinic (urgent care). They told her that it probably made sense to just give the usual Tylenol and Ibuprofen mix throughout the night and get him to the medical clinic tomorrow (wed). So we made it thru the night not too bad, and the next morning Kari took Talbey to the Lowell Medical Clinic to see Dr Berry Allen ( a great children’s Dr of Northwest Arkansas). During the visit, Dr. Allen noticed a slight rash on Talbey and was concerned about his high temperature and externally didn’t see reasons for such symptoms. So he ordered some blood work on Talbey and the results showed that his Platelets were on the lower side and it was a concern. Dr. Allen gave Talbey a shot of antibiotics and scheduled a follow up visit for Thursday morning @ 10:30am. Talbey fault throughout the rest of the day not feeling great but was still somewhat himself, playing at the Family Matters shop and watching Tom (Hom as Talbey would pronounce it)& Jerry for a few hours.
Once we got home that Wednesday night from the shop he took a nap and around 8pm he was in the sit and stand stroller for the walk we all took that night. He was feeling ok, but obviously he was not perfect, because he didn’t want to ride his own bike. Once ready for bed Wednesday night he started to vomit a bit. Around midnight of Thursday morning he started to vomit and had restroom problems about once every 1.5 hours. Kari was pretty much up all night with him until 6am, when dad took over the Talbey duties. He vomited one more time around 8am and then fell asleep. Kari and dad thought about taking him in before the clinic scheduled appointment, but since he fell asleep after the 8am episode, we decided to let him get some rest. He woke around 9:40ish and we loaded up to head to the clinic a bit early. We arrived @ the clinic at 10am and we went immediately to the lab area for blood work. Once dad carried to the lab area, Talbey was very much lethargic, so much so that he didn’t even notice that he pooped himself a little; thus we started having some serious concerns. Once the lab work was completed we went to meet with Dr. Allen again. He was very concerned about his dehydration and pretty much said it was time to admit to the hospital. During this time, the blood results came in and the concern raised because a lot of his #’s were way off. His platelets were even lower than the previous day, and now his white blood cell count was super high. So he was very concerned so much so that he wanted Talbey to move rooms and to get an IV started immediately. So within minutes he and his staff started searching for veins to start the IV. Talbey was immediately put on oxygen and we could tell is was serious because the staff was pretty frantic. After about 15 minutes the one nurse found a good vein and soon thereafter the ambulance was there ready to take Talbs to the hospital. It was amazing that Dr. Allen wanted and demanded that he ride with Talbey in the ambulance to the hospital. So Kari and Dr. Allen took Talbey to the Mercy Medical Center/Hospital. Once settled in at the hospital Dr. Allen set his demands for the Mercy staff and so thereafter he went back to the clinic to get caught up on his cancelled appointments, due to Talbey’s unexpected morning. It was about 12-noon that Talbey got settled in and he started making a pretty good recovery. At about 2pm he stated to get better but he was very very exhausted because they were searching for a second IV input and stuck him at least 8 times if not more. So after the Mercy staff gave up on sticking his dehydrated body, Talbey took a good nap, and he seemed to be doing fairly good. He seemed so good that dad went to pick up Gavin at school and went home to keep Gavin away from the situation. At about 4:30 Kari called and mentioned that the staff said that Talbey was getting much much worse, and on a scale of 1-10 of sickness he was approaching a 9. By the time Gavin and Dad got to the hospital @ 5pm, they were making the decision to get Talbey to the Arkansas Children’s Hospital of Little Rock. He was going to get life flighted via the Angle 1 helicopter. Dad hopped into the car immediately with the hope to beat the chopper to Little Rock. Just before he left, they needed to put a breathing tube into the little guy, and just before they did so, we kissed the little guy buy and he was so scared, it was so sad. Kari, Jo, Gavin and Graham waited for Talbey to get loaded onto the Angle 1, and about 7:45ish he took off to LRock.
Dad did just beat the chopper and once Talbey arrived at the ACH it was about 8:50ish. Dad patiently waited until about 11pm to finally see Talbey. The ACH staff was very much working hard and therow to get Talbey stable. He was not in a good position. Talbey at this time had just gone through a Septic Shock. Meaning his body got to the point that it no longer could fight whatever infection/bacteria was in his blood that his body shut down. Basically this meant his boby naturally was no longer going to serve his extremities, rather it was only going to serve the bodies main organs/systems. Because of this the staff was unable to find a great blood pressure (BP) reading and his blood pressure was very low for certain, in the 60’s. After pumping him with 3 times the recommended fluids to get his BP under control, they then needed to start figuring out what had caused his septic shock. The staff really needed to do a minor surgery to put in a Center Line, which allows the staff to get a much more accurate BP reading. They couldn’t do that minor surgery until they filled him with more platelets because he was so short of them form the initial illness. As they were waiting for the platelets from the lab, he had another pretty large episode with some low BP problems. The staff worked hard to get it back in stable condition. At this point Talbey was fighting for his life for sure. The staff pumped tons of BP medicine fluids into his system to help stable his low pressure. This made Talbey swell and bload because within the past 3 hours they filled him full with fluids. At this point Talbey was not a pleasant sight to see, nor was it even imaginable that just 24 hrs ago, he seemed just a bit sick with a high temp and a slight low on platelets.
Around 12-midnight of Friday morning (Aug 26th) the staff finally completed the entries of the platelets and they completed the successful entry of the central line, BP measuring mechanism. The next move for the staff was to find where this infection came from, what was it that shut his system down so quick. They seemed to have some concern about his abdomen area, so they ordered for a full CT, cat scan for that area. After about an hour wait for the dye to get fully into his abdomen area, they then took Talbey out of his Intensive care room for the 1st time. During this time, Kari, Jo, Gavin, & Graham was just arriving to Little Rock. After getting the family established at the La Quinta Inn of Downtown Little Rock, Kari joined dad at the intensive care unit at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. When Kari arrived to see Talbey for the 1st time, it was not pretty, as they just were returning Talbey from the cat scan, and during the event, they had to remove his ventilator so that he could get into the machine. Because the ventilator was set for such high pressure (peak), once the tube was taken from his lungs basically all the fluid, that was pumped into his body due to the demanded fluids to control the BP. Once the tube was removed that overloaded fluid filled the gap and filled much of Talbey’s lungs with fluid. If it didn’t fill has actual lung capacity, but it did fill in around his actual lungs which immediately effected his now controlled BP problem. Because of that incident, it definitely added towards his recovery time, because they had to go up on the peak pressure on his ventilator. Basically the rest of the evening was spend allowing him to remain stable by controlling the meds. The only other focus was to try to insert more IV’s into Talbey’s body. At this time he only had 3 entry ways, and there was a demand for many more.
MORE TO COME, as time permits. See the wall on the facebook page to know of the recent updates
