I’m sure some are wondering what has become of Bella’s pneumonia and hospital stay. We actually got home on late Wednesday afternoon and since then Bella has been back to normal. She coughs in the night time occasionally but nothing compared to the common cold. I guess they said we were lucky to get so many antibiotics into her through IV when we were in the hospital as that really seems to have helped her.
The reason for the hiatus on the blog wasn’t because Bella was sick. It was mainly due to catching up around the house after being gone for almost two days and for trying to get some extra sleep when I could, being that my night in the hospital with Bella produced little to no sleep. Bella slept right through all the nurses, I did not. Granted Bella was awake for 3 hours from 1:30 till after 4am in the morning. They switched rooms for her at that time and then she was up and playing.
The most memorable things about this trip to the hospital were.
1. I now know that if Bella needs to go to the hospital and time affords we should always take her downtown. The south children’s hospital is not comfortable dealing with her.
2. Every doctor had a different opinion about what was wrong with Bella. The doctors that actually saw her chest scan said it was pneumonia from a virus. The doctors that didn’t see the scan just assumed based on her condition that the pneumonia was bacterial because she had aspirated food. This point was a little frustrating to me. Bella is actually a very good eater, and I know that she is prone to aspiration (food or drink into the airways/lungs) because of her low tone. In the 4.5 years she has been eating she has never aspirated that we know of. I was scared that they were going to make us put a feeding tube in her. I thanked God that the pneumonia was in the lung that isn’t associated with aspiration so that this didn’t become an issue for us.
3. The doctor’s are always very worried that things will go wrong because she has the chromosome abnormality. This causes us to have to go through a lot of extra hoops and “play the game” as we call it about being extra careful and watchful of her. This time around it meant that they shuffled people around to get Bella into intensive care, because it was full but they didn’t feel safe putting her in a non-intensive room. The nurse in charge when Bella got to the ICU said in all his experience he has never seen a child come into the ICU like Bella did. Bella arrived in a cool and calm fashion with her typical legs crossed. The ICU is normally for very sick patients that arrive in distress.
4. We started lobbying for Bella to change into a normal room that evening. The nurses and residents that visited with us, felt that Bella did not need the ICU room, but again they weren’t quite sure of the unknown. We did feel a little bad when we kept bringing this up and were told that the only person who could approve the room change was the attending doctor and he was busy trying to save a kids life. We kind of dropped it at that point, saving a child’s life is a lot more important that getting Bella into another room.
5. Luckily (or unluckily for a mother trying to sleep) they changed rooms for Bella in the middle of the night. The “floor” rooms are more comfortable and allow more things. We can use our phones, we can bring food into the room, we can have visitors, etc. Oliver was in the hospital room with us for most of the day Wednesday, and he did a wonderful job being in the confined space. He even managed to take a short nap in the room.
Both kids did great with this experience. Bella was told she could leave when she ate food by mouth, she ate 3 servings of food between a late breakfast and lunch so we were good to go. I’m just glad she had an appetite.
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