Hospital, Take 2

iPad to the rescue!

I'm a pretty overprotective mom when it comes to my kids' health, especially Abby's.  I know I know, it's "good" for kids to be exposed to germs so they can become better immune to them.  I do believe that and I don't mind regular colds/sniffles (I despise throwing-up sick, but who doesn't?).  I will NOT bring my kids to nursery or primary at Church if they are sick in any way, though (runny nose, cough, etc) because I really hate when other parents do that.

Like I said, I don't mind the sniffles or a cold, but last time Abby got a bad cold, she wound up not being able to breathe and landed a 2.5 day stay in the hospital with what we assumed was pneumonia.  She has also gotten pretty bad on previous occasions with a cold, but that was the first time she wound up being hospitalized.  So, I'm pretty wary of coughing kids now, too.

Sure enough, on Tuesday afternoon Abby started breathing a bit heavily (I saw one of her friends coughing in Abby's face on Sunday and just knew it was bad news for the week).  I gave her a breathing treatment right away, trying to stay on top of it, and we gave her treatments every 4 hours through the night.  Wednesday morning we headed to the doctor's office, where they said because of her breathing problems that day, and because of her similar symptoms last July, she probably has asthma, a kind that is flared by upper-respiratory infections.  It makes sense to me.  But, the official name of the diagnosis is not what worries me.  What worries me is that every time Abby gets a cold, she could easily wind up in the hospital!  Sure enough, later that night Garrett drove Abby to the pediatric ER, where they admitted her as a patient and they spent the night.  I took over around noon Thursday so Garrett could come home and get some sleep, and thankfully I was able to bring her home that evening (less than 24 hours there, thankfully).  On Friday she had a follow-up appointment where her doctor gave us a daily prescription for her asthma, and she also got a chest x-ray to be sure there wasn't any lingering pneumonia.  Thankfully, Garrett was able to pull up her x-ray at work and talk to his attending about it almost immediately, so we got our results pretty quickly.

So, that was our life last week.  It was rough.  Like I've said before on this blog, I consider myself to be extremely incompetent as a mom of a sick child.  I freak out and my emotions get way too crazy to deal with anything, so it gets left up to Garrett.  Of course, I can give medications on a schedule, and I can comfort my sick children, but I feel extremely inadequate to deal with the stress of it all (which is really strange because I rarely get stressed out about anything else, I consider myself to be pretty low-key).  Outwardly, no one would probably guess how I feel (I'm not actually freaking out), and I can even hide it from Garrett pretty well I think, but on the inside I'm a mess and I want to run away and put my head in the sand and avoid it all.

So, I officially have a kid with asthma, which is totally new territory for me.  It's stressful, but I'm happy to have a diagnosis and a medication that will hopefully stave off any more hospital stays.  I have been dreading winter for that very reason (upper respiratory infections), but now I can rest a bit easy knowing (hoping) that all will be okay with this medication.  I will say, though, that giving a daily medication (breathing treatment) twice daily is going to take some getting used to.

The blessings:

- Friends at the hospital.  When Garrett took Abby to the ER, they were there for several hours before being admitted into the children's ward.  At 2 a.m., our good friend from Newport News (here doing his residency as well) just happened to be walking through the ER and heard Abby's name mentioned.  He immediately found Abby and Garrett and stopped to say hello and see how they were doing.  It's always nice to see friendly faces at the hospital.

-Nurse friends.  I was having problems scheduling Abby's follow-up appointment, but thankfully our friend's wife (see above note) works as a nurse who actually schedules those appointments!  She was able to get us in with no problems.

-Good pharmacists.  We have a $40 copay with our health insurance, so I was expecting to pay $40 per month for Abby's medication.  However, our doctor had written our prescription with 6 refills, and the pharmacist told us that we could get 3 months filled at one time, with one copay.  So, instead of paying $480 per year, we'll only have to pay $160.  Such a blessing.  I was also able to pay one $40 copay for two refills of her inhaler for emergencies.

-Modern medicine, obviously.

-And, of course the blessing of having good health insurance.  Hospital stays would be a million times more stressful without it.

There are always silver linings, and sometimes you don't even have to look very hard for them.