Sick and Sicker

Well, I knew boys were more accident prone, and I guess I had steeled myself for an occasional trip to the ER for broken bones or stiches....but not at 6 months old and for illness.

As I mentioned before, Ethan and Emily have been sick all week. While Emily's pnuemonia was apparently caught pretty early and she has responded well to the antibiotics, Ethan didn't fare so well. He just got sicker.

We had been giving Ethan nebulizer treatments three times a day since Tuesday, but by Friday night, I just didn't like the way he was breathing. He seemed to be working too hard. I debated trying to get into the after-hours clinic at the pediatrician that night, but he went to sleep and did okay, so I waited.

On Saturday morning, he was still really struggling with wheezing and working pretty hard to breathe, so we made an appointment with the on-call pediatrician (not our regular one) and he and I went in to the office. They were somewhat busy, though I've seen it worse, and the doctor was less than attentive, to put it midly. Ethan was audibly wheezing and retracting during each breath. She listened to him for about 5 seconds, ordered a breathing treatment with the nebulizer and diagnosed him with asthma. Then she left the room and told me to come get her when we were done, otherwise "she might not remember to come back". (Yeah, I know what you're thinking.) So when he was done, she came back, listened to him for about 5 seconds, told us to use the nebulizer every 4-6 hours, give him steroids and oh yeah, antibiotics for an ear infection. She was standing in the open doorway (privacy?) and I could barely get her to answer a single question. Then she left. I did ask her how long it would take to see some improvement in his breathing (as I was paying, I saw her again). She said it would be slow...24-48 hours. So we left, me feeling very uneasy with how he still sounded and less than confident in her diagnosis.

About 2 hours after the treatment, Ethan was really struggling with breathing again, sitting on the floor with his mouth open and tongue hanging out...almost panting. We decided to take him to the ER. So, Andrew stayed home with Emily (since she certainly didn't need to catch anything else) and I took Ethan (being his main source of food!) We waited about 45 minutes to be checked in. He had a fever and they ordered chest x-rays and a breathing treatment. We got the x-rays done (second time in less than a week) and then they did the breathing treatment in the waiting room of the ER (privacy...ha). After about 3 hours in the waiting room, which is a very interesting place from a people-watching perspective, I might add, we got to go back to a treatment room to actually see a doctor. We spent another 2 hours there, hanging out and watching tv, before we found out that we were going to be admitted for the night.

The above picture is from the ER treatment room.

So around 8:30/9:00pm, we checked into our hospital room on the pediatric floor with the knowledge that we would be having another patient spend the night with us later in the evening. It was a rough night for kids with coughs. The nurses hooked Ethan up to a pulse oximeter and we monitored his breathing and he did really well, but was obviously working too hard to breathe. Still, we settled in for a long night...with strange roomates.

And a long night it was. I managed to get Ethan to sleep in his crib pretty quickly, especially since he hadn't napped all afternoon. However, hospitals aren't quiet and too many people were coming and going and he woke up and that was the end of that. He wanted to sleep, he just wouldn't do it in the crib. Actually, if I could have let him fuss a bit and wiggle around to get comfy, he probably would have. However they had him all propped up with blankets and he prefers to sleep on his side or tummy, which just wasn't happening in the crib....so he slept with/on me in the recliner all night. Notice I said "he" slept...not me. Not even for 10 minutes. It was a long...long night. I remembered college all-nighters. Not the partying kind, mind you, but the working kind. I remembered why I never liked them then and like them even less in a hot uncomfortable environment 10 years later.

Around 4 am, the nurse came in and told us that Ethan needed to put on some oxygen since his O2 levels weren't staying up high enough and he was having to work too hard to breathe. So, while he was sleeping, they taped a nasal canula to his face and started giving him oxygen and monitoring him even closer. He slept through it. Let's just say that when he woke up, he was less than thrilled to have something blowing air in his nose. (Sidenote: I was trying to describe the canula to Emily...,she's seen them before, but didn't really know what they were, so I told her that Ethan had little "nose fans". She liked that idea!)

Over the course of the day, Ethan was diagnosed with Bronchiolitis, which is basically caused by any number of viruses and ends up irritating and restricting his bronchiol tubes, causing wheezing and breathing problems. Usually it isn't too serious and doesn't require hospitalization, but Ethan ended up with a bad case, partly due to his age. No asthma, no ear infection, no need for antibiotics or steroids. In fact, nebulizer treatments weren't even a must, though they don't hurt. In short, the on-call pediatrician just plain got it wrong.

So we spent the rest of Sunday in the hospital. Once Ethan could keep his oxygen level up over 90% consistently (while he was sleeping) then we could go. He never stayed up over 90% the whole time, but the doctor told us that he was doing better and staying over 90% much better than in the morning, so she let us go home.

Ethan is still sick, and we're still watching him really closely. To be perfectly honest, I guess I won't be surprised if we end up making another trip to the hospital in the next couple of days. He still sounds pretty bad, and that's a scary thing to hear. We're watching him like a hawk and trying to keep him comfortable. He has slept quite a bit today and is very irritable. It's hard to know if he's crabby because he's over tired, if he's tired because he's over-tired (like me) or if he's actually lethargic. Right now, I'm leaning to the lethargic side, but hoping I'm wrong. We go back to the regular pediatrician tomorrow morning for a follow-up for both kids, so hopefully we can at least make it through another night at home and get an expert opinion tomorrow.

Poor little guy. So sick. So tired. So sweet.



Please pray for improved health for all of us. Andrew and I both have sore throats and Emily still sounds like she will cough up a lung. We're all a bit stressed and worried.