12Nov07 - Advance Clinic 6 Day 1

We travelled down to Surrey yesterday as this week we will be at the Scotson Advance Centre in East Grinstead with Lucy. We are fortunate to be able to stay with my Aunt who only lives 20 mins drive from the clinic. Lucy has out grown her travel cot so she has to sleep on an old matress on the floor which actually looked quite comfortable.Lucy has not been herself for the last couple of days and we have suspected that she has been brewing something. She has been tense and uncomfortable and as a result, hardly slept last night. We kept checking on her all night just to make sure she was ok and not having a fit.

When we got to the clinic this morning Dawn arranged for an appointment at a local surgery to get Lucy checked out. Initially they refused to see Lucy and Dawn had to go through the hassle of explaining that we were not resident in East Grinstead and that our temporary address was also not in East Grinstead but we really needed to get Lucy checked out. Finally the jobs worths agreed to see Lucy and gave us an emergency appointment. However it did mean that we had to cut the morning therapy session short to take her.We managed to learn the first few excercises before we had to rush off for our 10:30 appointment.It turns out that Lucy has an ear infection and also the doctor could hear something on one of her lungs so prescribed anti-biotics (amoxicillin). By the time we got back to the clinic it was time to feed Lucy before taking her in the oxygen chamber for hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We had asked the doctor whether we should take her in the chamber and he had suggested that it should be ok and to see how she coped with it. We decided it was worth it considering the effort to get here and if she had shown any real signs of distress we would have got her straight out. I took her in the large chamber which involves Lucy wearing a sealed hood which is fed with 100% oxygen.It has a rubber seal which is quite difficult to put on without pulling her hair but we did manage ok this time. Lucy is in the chamber for an hour and during this time the pressure inside is varied to make the lungs work harder and to increase the oxygen absorbtion in the bloodstream. The purpose of this therapy is to help address issues caused by lack of oxygen, oxygen starvation and a weak respiratory system by increasing oxygen concentration in the blood stream.Unfortunately for Lucy it means she has to be an uncomfortable space cowgirl for an hour every day this week and one of her unfortunate parents will have to hold her squirming, arching complaining little body in a claustrophobic decompression chamber for the same amount of time. The worst bit for Lucy is getting the hood back off again because it always pulls her hair which gives her the perfect excuse to scream the place down for the next ten minutues.

After the oxygen therapy we were able to catch up on learning the therapy excercises that we missed in the morning which meant we didn't really miss anything. Lucy coped quite well with today but she is obviously not too well. Hopefully the cocktail of medicines she is now taking will kick in and she will have a good day tomorrow.