21st of September – Trauma part 2

His eyes were staring forward and he had a very low frequency in breathing. His body functions closed down to minimum. His head fell forward and I tried to hold his head up to free his airways. I begged him to keep on breathing for mummy. During this Nigel drove as fast as he could without us risking more lives or James even more. During this the hospital called back to me to see how far away we were and she reassured they were expecting us at child ER and she said step on it. Oh Nigel did! He handled everything amazingly. I kept watching James and expected that he would stop breathing completely after every breath. Traffic was a nightmare. Red lights and waiting for other cars. I was upset swearing at the cars of course. It was a ten minute drive. Finally at child ER I got him up from his car seat, I ran out from the car with him in my arms. Inside the building I found myself having a dying James in my arms, standing in a stair room with stairs or elevator. I took the stairs. Two stairs up, I ran in corridors following signs and finally found the correct door. A nurse pointed and I ran into a room with a trauma team waiting by a baby trauma bed. I ran in and put him on it. I relaxed a bit.....just a bit. But I knew for some reason he was dying on us. He was in their hands now and we had done all we could for our beloved baby boy. Two paediatricians were there and a children’s nurse. Two minutes later James stopped breathing. Two or three more doctors rushed in. A doctor started James´s breathing again with an Ambu bag mask. Poor Nigel came in, found a chair and sat beside me. We held each other and cried totally devastated. A nurse asked if we wanted to go out from the room and wait in a separate one. I said no way and Nigel felt the same. I thought if James died his mummy should be there. Looking up there was now 18 doctors and specialists in the room. The first thing a young doctor told me when he listened on James heart was that “well luckily it´s not the heart and his circulation is fine” Both me and Nigel looked at each other and went “phew”. The doctors discussed back and forth and made phone calls for more help. I don’t know which time scale all this happened, it felt like hours surely we are talking minutes. A tall grey haired man with green clothes and hat walked in and asked for details and checked James symptoms. He came up to us presenting himself as Per Westin (chief paediatrics) and said that they would give James a medicine for something they expected he had and that would make him a lot better if that was the case. A few minutes later a cardiologist came in with a scan. It didn´t take him long to turn around and inform us that James had a very difficult, complicated and rare heart syndrome. HLHS, Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome.