It looked like Natalie picked up a cold the other day and I was hoping that this time she would kick it like a champ, but that’s not quite what happened… After a truly horrible night where her oxygen was struggling to stay above 90 and she was just a fussy mess, we took her in the see the pediatrician. Unfortunately, our usual pediatrician was out for the day and we had to see a new doctor who knew none of her history.
I went through her past few illnesses and how her sats weren’t doing great last night. I got the impression pretty quickly that he couldn’t believe I hadn’t taken her to the ER in the middle of the night. Unlike last time, when our usual doctor sent us down to get x-rays and then we discussed what to do (which ended up in going straight to the pediatric unit), this doctor sent us over to the ER.
Natalie was not impressed…
They, of course, took the x-rays in the room and started taking blood work to see what we were dealing with.
Which was great, but it was also getting time for her to eat and we (stupidly) didn’t have her food or pump. Luckily it was time for me to pump and I had thought enough ahead to bring that along. So I pumped and then after waiting way too long for them to bring a feeding pump down from the peds unit, I improvised. We only had a 10ml syringe with us, but it’s not like I had anything better to do in the room. So I climbed up with her and fed her lunch one small syringe-full at a time.
She seemed to appreciate the effort. :)
Unsurprisingly, she got admitted to the peds unit. There was a bit of a scary mix-up at the hospital pharmacy that fortunately led to an under-dose on antibiotics rather than the alternative. But once the dust settled from that, she was chilling in her usual room. They decided it was pneumonia, which has pretty much been my worst fear since we found out she was high aspiration risk. I don’t understand how when she has such high risk for aspiration pneumonia that her GI specialist didn’t seem concerned about managing her ridiculous reflux beyond the meds that make it less irritating to her esophagus.
Needless to say it was a pretty upsetting day and the only upside was that she seemed to be doing fine without any oxygen. And as long as she stayed off of it, it would only be an overnight stay!
Which it was! They told us to follow-up with her usual pediatrician the next day and to keep giving her the antibiotics. They even wrote us a prescription for albuterol “as-needed” to help her with breathing. Of course they didn’t write a prescription for the special nebulizer mask that the pulmonologist had insisted she needed, but that’s what happens when none of your specialists work together…
Of course when we went to go see Dr. Tappel, he was 100% certain it wasn’t pneumonia and that it was just another respiratory infection. He discussed her x-rays with us, pulled up her old ones to compare and told us we could stop the antibiotics. He also gave us permission if she gets sick on his days off to have the office page him, which is much preferable to what we had to deal with yesterday.
The one good outcome is that we got to discuss her recent ph probe results and he is on the same page I am with not enough is being done to manage it. So he is going to talk to all of her specialists here about getting her into an Aerodigestive clinic down in Seattle that focuses on eating & breathing problems. Hopefully that happens sooner rather than later!