Anne's Hospital Stay

I am sure some of you have noticed that I haven't been around much. This has been my first post in a while. We had a scare with Anne last weekend...

She caught what we thought was a simple cold about ten days ago. Last Saturday, she started coughing a lot. She didn't sleep well on Saturday night, we listened to her cough most of the night.

Sunday wasn't any better. By Sunday early evening, I knew that some type of action needed to be taken. Not thinking she was very sick, I made the HUGE mistake of taking her to an Urgent Care center right down the street from us. The Dr was a total moron. He gave her some Orapred and wrote a script for an antibiotic and told me that she would probably be better in the morning, but if she didn't sound better to me, or got worse, to take her to the Emergency Room.

Thankfully, I am good friends with our pediatrician. I called Janette when we got home and she told me to take her to the ER right away.

We got to the ER around 8:30pm. The ER physician was wonderful; I actually worked with him in the PICU at Cardinal Glennon, so I knew she was in good hands. Her RSV and FLU tests came back neg. By 12:15am, the could not get her breathing under control, so they admitted her to the Intensive Care Unit. It took three people to hold her down to put in an IV.

Anne spent 2 days in the PICU with continuous breathing treatments for the first 12 hours, then q1, q2, q3, and finally q4.

She was transferred to a normal pediatric floor on Tuesday morning. We were released from the hospital on Wednesday early afternoon.

There was no real explanation of what caused her to have breathing difficulty. She has responded well to her Xopenex and antibiotic, so we are thinking that she either caught a virus or an URI that went terribly wrong. She is now being treated as if she is an asthmatic, which doesn't surprise me as Sam is, but many Doctors won't label a child an asthmatic until around the age of five.

Learn from my mistakes....Don't EVER use an Urgent Care. I will never set foot in one ever again. I would also like to thank my local Walgreens for taking FOUR hours to fill Anne's 5 prescriptions and causing her to be over an hour late on a breathing treatment, even though they told me her scripts would be ready in an hour and a half. They've lost my business for sure.

That is what has been going on around here. It's been stressful and emotionally draining. Anne is doing well at home; eating well, playing well, and sleeping well as if nothing ever happened. Kids are amazing.