First Hospital Stay
This past Wednesday, Lina had been feeling a little under the weather, so I wasn’t surprised when she wasn’t excited to help me water the garden in the afternoon. She’d been pretty clingy all day. I was watching her out of the corner of my eye as I watered the blueberries, and noticed that she was standing stock still. I shouldn’t have to tell you that this is strange behavior for a two year old. This kid does not simply stand still and ponder the universe. She kicks ass at all times.
I walked over to her, and saw that she was breathing fast and wheezing. Too fast. I grabbed her and strode into the house, initially to find one of our pediatrics books. Wheezing was a new thing for her, and so far was something I’d never had to look up. I actually had the book in my hand when I decided to just call the damn nurse line and ask somebody how worried I should be. I got the answer very quickly, and was told to load the kid up and bring her straight to Children’s Hospital. The nurse would call ahead and let them know we were coming.
Confession: I did not know how to get there. I called Shane to tell him what was going on, then told him I’d call him again from the car for directions. Somehow I got the dogs situated, and got out of the house calmly and quickly. Mostly, I wanted to be fast and to not cause Lina to worry. Luckily, we are often in a hurry when we leave for school in the morning, so she’s used to me calling, “LINA! We have to GO now!”
We got there just fine, filled out mounds of paperwork, and were finally seen. Shane arrived a little while after we did. The good news was that her blood oxygen was just fine. She was having trouble breathing, but she was getting enough air into her body. The docs wanted to give her a bronchodilator (a rescue med to open up her lungs) via a nebulizer. This basically meant that we had to hold her down and hold a plastic thing over her screaming face for forty-five minutes.
Note to docs: DO NOT tell me the treatment will take twenty-five minutes when it will actually take forty-five. That will piss me off.
The first treatment did almost nothing to help her, so a second treatment was ordered. She was also given a hefty dose of corticosteroids. The second nebulizer treatment did help her a little, but not enough to make everyone confident that we were on the home stretch. We got to the ER around 6pm, and at around 2am were admitted to a room for the night. Lina continued to receive respiratory treatments every few hours. And she continued to hate them, as any reasonable person would. And she continued to express her preferences passionately, which I thought was a good sign.
Did I mention that a side effect of the bronchodilator is that it’s also a stimulant? Yep. Lina was pretty much speaking in tongues after two sessions with the old nebulizer.
The whole experience was more frustrating than frightening. Once we got to the hospital, I knew we were in the best hands possible. Unfortunately, the best hands’ critical thinking skills are not as honed as I’d like them to be. We had to answer the same damn questions over and over again. At times I felt like someone was simply matching our answers with a matrix somewhere that would give them likely diagnoses. In the end, we were forced to watch a video about asthma, given a “handbook” about asthma, and told by the discharging doc that they are not saying that Lina has asthma. We interpret this to mean that nobody knows why she suddenly had a hard time breathing, but if it happens again, we’ll have a rescue med nearby. And that this is called asthma.
We didn’t get to leave until late Thursday night, but after we were given the okay I packed that hospital room in less than two minutes. Lina was saying, “Om! Ngy-ngy!” (home, Lily). As we walked down the corridor, one of the nurses waved goodbye to Lina, and Lina’s response was “Ngy-ngy!” That moment was the closest I came to crying. I loved that Lina couldn’t wait to get home, that she was looking forward to seeing Lily, and that she assumed that everyone in the world knows who Lily is. At moments like that I want to curve my entire being around that child and protect her from everything that is cold and uncaring in the world.
We were able to walk out of the hospital, our family complete. I knew, as those automatic doors opened and then closed tightly behind us, how lucky we were. How lucky we are.
PS) Thank you Art & Ellen. We needed that.