Sunday, September 24, 2006

When It Rains, It Pours

You know that I took Hannah to the Doctor and she was treated for asthma. Well, she had a follow-up appointment on Saturday. Hannah and I get into the car Saturday morning and head to the doctor. On the way there, our Realtor calls and says we finally have a showing. Yay!!!! So, I call Mike and tell him about it and he tells me to get home as soon as I can to help clean up. No problem I tell him.

Needless to say, I didn't make it home.

When we got to the doctor's office, they took her oxygen levels and she was at 95%. Not bad but they want to give her a breating treatment before we head home. Fine. They give her a treatment and her levels actually go down. WTF? The doctor's not happy so he decides to give her another treatment. Just as they start, a nurse walks in with an oxygen tank (I'm really freaking out now) and hooks the nebulizer tubing to the oxygen tank. Her levels go up to 98/99%. Yay! As soon as they turn off the oxygen, she goes right back down to 90%. Crap. They're going to give it one more shot and if they still don't come up, it's hospital time. After the third treatment, she was still hovering around 90%. He gives us some paperwork and tells us to head up to the pediatric department at the hospital. They'll be waiting for us.

Sure enough, we walk up to pediatrics and there were two nurses standing in the hallway waiting for us. They show us to our room and get Hannah settled in. They're going to put Hannah on breating treatments every two hours and every other dose will also have some sort of bronchial dialator (or some such thing...my head was swimming at this point) in it.

After a while, the doctor comes back in and tells me that they think she may have a small amount of pneumonia as well so they'll put her on an antibiotic. They're also going to push her treatments to every three hours and see how she does. If she can make it through the night without oxygen and once she can get to the four hour point between treatments, we can go home.

She made it through the night without needing oxygen although she came close to needing it.

So, this morning, they pushed her treatments to every four hours and she did well. The doctor (another one from the practice) comes in this afternoon and asks me if the x-rays were explained to me. I told her that it was my understanding that she had a touch of pneumonia. She said yes and no. What she believes is going on is the little sacs at the bottom of her right lung were not getting enough oxygen and were not blowing up (essentially, they had collapsed). She was going to continue the antibiotic since she believes there's something going on but we are all set to go home. We need to make an appointment to come in on Wednesday but continue doing what they were doing and hopefully we'll be fine.

The nurse comes in with our discharge papers and unhooks Hannah from the machine. She was so excited that she started running around the room. It was so good to make it home.

Hopefully, we won't be having anymore excitement for a while. I'm tired...you'd think they'd provide softer sleeping surfaces for the parents in that hospital!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm glad you're home and Hannah is a little better. It's so scary.

Barbara said...

It really is! The respiratory therapist said that she sounded completely clear this afternoon and she's doing well now that she's home. She's on so much stuff now that I had to put a schedule up on the refrigerator!

Anonymous said...

Aw. Poor little kid.

Barbara said...

She seems to be doing okay today. One of my neighbors, who is a nurse (we have two nurses on the street), said that she'd come over this afternoon and listen to her chest for me to make sure she was still clear. I've also got her follow up appointment set for Wednesday. Jonna was full of questions about how we discoverd she's got asthma...I think she suspects it with Addy.

Susan said...

better to find out now, before winter sets in and you have the issues you had last winter. Poor little thing.

Barbara said...

I know...I feel so badly for her. She's taking it all in stride, though. She's quite the trooper.

Anonymous said...

How's she doing today, Barb? I've been thinking about her quite a bit lately.

Barbara said...

She seems to be doing better...we have a recheck today so I'll let you know how it goes!