Yet Another Hospital Scare
Maria isn’t feeling well this week. She got a bad cough, bad enough that Cathy called the nurse line Wednesday. They said to give her breathing treatments every four hours and if Maria hadn’t improved by morning to call the doctor.
The breathing treatments helped a bit but not enough. Plus since the albuterol is a stimulant, Maria got very wired and shaky. She didn’t sleep at all Wednesday night. Cathy took her to the doctor on Thursday. He listened to her chest for about a second and said it was bad. He wanted a blood test and chest x-rays. As usual, the idiot nurse tortured Maria for about 20 minutes trying to get blood out of her while Maria struggled and struggled. After that, Cathy took her for a chest x-ray. That was tough because they were not set up for a kid who can’t sit up on her own.
The concern in all this is pneumonia, particularly aspiration pneumonia, which would require hospitalization. They took the x-rays and everyone was concerned over how Maria was panting for breath and looked generally awful. Cathy assumed that they would take the x-ray to the radiologist immediately. Nope. They sent her home. She waited and waited and finally called - the doctor of course had gone home for the day but might get around to looking at it the next day (today). It’s 10 am now and still no call. I guess it’s good that Maria hasn’t suffocated in her own phlegm yet. We still don’t know if Maria is going to spend the weekend in the hospital or not.
In other news, we may have finally found an easy way to give medicine to a toddler. Cathy found something called ReliaDose. It’s a bottle with a syringe imbedded in it so we can trickle in the medicine as she drinks. She hasn’t fought it or choked on the medicine once so far.
The only other event this week is that I’ve removed the ability to add comments to Maria’s pictures. There were only a handful of real comments anyhow…but there were also more than 17,000 spam comments. It’s ridiculous that I hadn’t noticed sooner, but that shows how seldom we look. If people really want to comment, they can do so here at the blog which has spam protection.