Hospital alphabet soup: ER and PICU

Happy Fourth. We all had an exciting one here. Very early on the 4th, like 2:30 a.m., C woke me up and said, "A's retracting. I just gave him albuterol and it didn't seem to work. I think we need to go to the hospital."

Now sometimes it takes me forever to wake up, but that one got me instantly awake. I looked in at A and said, "Yeah, we're going to the ER." C had been up since midnight with A (letting the pregnant lady sleep, thank you). When A can't breathe, he can't sleep. But A was pretty pale and lethargic and uncommunicative.

Off we go. We throw clothes for A and some other random supplies into his preschool backpack: a book for me, extra underpants, his immunization card. We make it to the hospital around 3 and park at the curb in front of the emergency room. We go to the front desk of a huge waiting room and explain what's happening to A. The nurse takes a look at A and immediately takes him into the back to put him on oxygen. His first oxygen saturation level was 82-85%. Normal is in the 90s, the high 90s for being awake. At 75%, you pass out.

We were in the ER for about three hours while they tried a couple different drugs on him: albuterol, xophenex, magnesium sulfide. They put an IV in to get stuff to him quicker than the nebulizer. They took blood tests. Nothing was making him better, so then they admitted him to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) where he could get more treatments and continuous monitoring.

So we spent Saturday in the PICU while they worked on A. He slept for about an hour during the day, but spent most of his time watching television (what a novelty!). They changed up his drug cocktails and put him on heliox, which is a helium and oxygen mixture that's not as hard for someone to breathe as straight oxygen. By the end of the day he was stable but not great. He was so hungry but they weren't letting him eat until they were happy with his oxygen levels and drug cocktails, so he didn't get to eat anything until the afternoon. First some juice, then a popscile, then it was the clears for dinner: broth, Jello, Italian ice, juice.

C and I slept in the PICU with him, C on the pull-out chair and me on the window seat that was just shy of five feet long. None of us slept particularly well. Both C and I were up with A at different times. A was hooked up to six different sensors, plus the IV, and all that tubing is hard on a wiggle worm who moves around a lot in his sleep. The nurse eventually knotted it all together into a kind of corset so he wasn't getting tangled every five minutes.

Sunday he looked a lot better. He was alert and had opinions about what movie he should watch and how he didn't want the sensors on him. He ate a bowl of cereal. He was let off the sensors to go to the potty and that became his way to get up out of that bed. [A side note: the kid is potty trained. He wouldn't go in his diaper, even when we told him there was no way to get him off all the monitors and IVs and he should go in the diaper, so he held it until we found a bedpan and took the diaper off. He is so potty trained.]

Sunday night they debated releasing us or sending us to the medical/surgery floor for observation, deciding (with our supporting opinion) that he should probably spend another night just to make sure the maintenance treatments were working. So down we went to another floor, another room. When we got there, we were in one of the few double rooms on the floor with a family loudly watching soccer with two obnoxious wounded children, but they checked out not long after we got there and we had the room to ourselves for the rest of the time.

Sunday night, I slept in the folding chair and C slept on the floor. We were all a bit slap-happy at that point. A was disconnected from all the monitors and his IV, so he slept much better. The nurses checked A's vitals every four hours; the respiratory therapists administered treatments every four, and none of them really woke him up from sleeping, so that was fabulous and appreciated.

Monday, A was much, much better. He spent all the time he could in the playroom and took a nap around his normal naptime for a really long time. The nurses decided around noon that we would go home; we just needed a lot of paperwork and approvals because the PICU was still following A's case. But they let us go around 5-5:30, loaded A up with drugs and us up with filled prescriptions, and sent us home. And our friends and family from out of town delayed our dinner reservations so we could go home, hand off A to our darling neighbor, and go out for a fabulous dinner.

I'm so tired. A's pretty tired. C is tired. We've got new drugs to hopefully keep us out of the hospital in the future; we've got appointments with all sorts of doctors to keep us on track and help us figure this out. But as I write this, A is laughing in the tub and having fun with Daddy so things are much better here now.