It's been a rough couple days around here. It's better now, but things were a little scary. When we woke up Thursday morning, B had what appeared to be pink eye. Obviously, we couldn't send him to daycare (although, apparently, some of the other parents at daycare didn't find that so obvious), and since I stayed home with him LAST week, E agreed to stay home with him. I went to work, and E took B to the doctor. The diagnosis was conjunctivitis (pink eye) and the beginnings of an ear infection. When I came home Thursday evening, I noticed he was also starting to wheeze a little bit. So, we gave him his antibiotics, and we gave him a dose of the nebulizer. We put him up in his crib and he slept for a little while, but was wailing soon enough. I went up to get him because it was obvious he wasn't going back to sleep. Since I was working from home Friday, I told E to go to bed and I'd stay downstairs with him. Neither of us slept very much that night (I think I slept about half an hour, total.). He was just fitful and I could tell he was uncomfortable. And he was definitely having trouble breathing normally. But I knew my Mom was coming Friday morning, so I knew we'd get through until then. And if anyone can identify a child in distress, it's my Mom. We gave him a nebulizer treatment before Eric went to work. After that, he was in pretty good shape, so Eric went to work. He was okay for about a half hour, and then he really started to struggle again. Later in the morning, I gave him another neb treatment. He was in good shape again, so I fed him. My Mom got here right after that, and once again, he was good for around a half hour, and then started to deteriorate. My Mom became pretty concerned, pretty quickly, especially when he didn't want a bath, which he normally loves. She told me to call the doctor. This was around 10:30. They told me they had a 3:00 open, but we both felt like B couldn't wait that long to go in. They managed to squeeze us in for 11:15, so I got dressed very quickly (no shower, naturally) and we put him in a new onesie and took off. When we got to the doctor, it was pretty clear that everyone now understood why we needed to come right in. B was having so much trouble breathing that he was grunting and crying with each breath he struggled to take. It was about the worst sound I've ever heard. They gave him another nebulizer treatment at the office. It helped, but his oxygen saturation level only went from 89 to 92. They want it to be as close to 100 as possible. So, the NP told us she wanted us to head across the street to the hospital, just to be on the safe side. And off we went to the hospital, where they gave him a chest ex-ray, another nebulizer treatment, put an oxygen tube up his nose, gave him a steroid and put in an IV (which took a couple tries and finally had to be inserted by a NICU nurse), because the doctor felt he wasn't stable enough to try to eat, both because his breathing was so poor and because he was sick enough that he probably wouldn't keep food down very well.
The afternoon was really just a succession of nebulizer treatments, between which he would improve slightly and then deteriorate. The ex-ray determined that he had Restrictive Airway Disease, with possible pneumonia in the lower right lobe, but the doctor thought it probably was not actually pneumonia, since he never had a fever. Finally, early in the evening, he just fell dead asleep. His poor little body was just completely exhausted after struggling to breathe for so long. He slept through the night, pretty much, except when the nurse woke him for medication. E and I both stayed at the hospital too, of course. There was a daybed couch thing in the room, so I slept on that, and the nurses got a chair version of the daybed from an empty room and he slept on that. I actually slept surprisingly well. I think it was because a) I was exhausted from not sleeping the previous night and b) I knew the nurses would be checking on B throughout the night, and plus, he was hooked up to machines that were monitoring his heart rate and breathing, so if anything were amiss, they would start beeping.
This morning, B woke up at 5:15 and was immediately our boy again, thank God. He was his chipper self, smiling and chatting, and flirting with the nurses. He had some milk first thing, and that was another good sign. By noon time, he had eaten some bananas, and we knew we'd be able to take him home this afternoon.
I know that one night in the hospital isn't that huge a deal, but I have to say, it was one of the scariest things I've been through. Just knowing that your child can't breathe - especially knowing, as I do, how that feels - is a horrible feeling. I have gained so much more appreciation for everything my Mom went through as a mother since I had B, and after yesterday, I understand now why she tended to be so over protective of me at times. She went through what I went through yesterday on a number of occasions. And back then, they didn't have nebulizers or any of that, which must've made it even scarier. I love B with everything in me and I was so unbelievably elated this morning to see him acting himself again.
No comments:
Post a Comment