Sick

Dylan has been lucky to pick up every illness around lately, he had croup, then what seemed to be bronchitis and then he just seemed to not get rid of them. Last Monday night, he was coughing non-stop all night long. He woke up and was a little cranky but seemed the same for him as he had been dealing with the colds/respiratory problems for awhile. Though that evening he was sounding worse when he coughed and his breathing was sounding raspy and he would cry after he would cough. His babysitter said he wasn't acting like himself all day either. So at 5:30, we decided to take him into the walk-in clinic. The nurse checked his pulse oxygen level and it was lower than normal and she noticed his breathing was labored. The doctor verified and also noticed he had an ear infection in one ear. They did a nebulizer treatment with Albuterol to open his bronchioles to help him breath but he was still using too much of his stomach muscles to breath which isn't normal. After the second treatment, they ordered a chest x-ray to see if he maybe had pnemonia, which he did. Though the nebulizer treatments seemed to help a little bit, he was still wheezing when breathing. They were on the fence as to whether or not they wanted to have him admitted to the hospital overnight. Seeing that I had a board exam the next morning, we asked if there was any other option. They did a double dose of the nebulizer and consulted with the other doctor and called the pediatric respiratory therapist at Providence and decided that he could go home as long as we received a nebulizer to do treatments for him overnight. So we left the walk-in at 8:40 to stop at the drive through pharmacy for his Albuterol, antibiotic for the ear infection, and more steroids to open his airways. At 10pm the medical delivery service still hadn't called to let us know they were coming to deliver the nebulizer so I called them to be told they didn't deliver past 9pm! Knowing his breathing wasn't doing well, I called the on-call doctor from the doctor's office and he confirmed that I should take him to the ER to get nebulizer treatments seeing that since he was having to breathe so hard, his little body could wear out and he could stop breathing in his sleep overnight. I took him to the ER at 11:30 where they gave him a nebulizer treatment and an inhaler to take home with us to make it through the rest of the night...we got home at 3am. I had to leave for my board exams that morning so Joe stayed home with him. We got ahold of the medical delivery service the next morning and they told us that they deliver 24 hours and whomever told us they didn't was wrong! We were so mad at the guy that told us otherwise, I had to spend half the night in the ER and lose sleep before a board exam! He is doing so much better now, basically 100% other than a slight runny nose. Though he didn't enjoy his nebulizer treatments, he tolerated them and took his medicine fine. He's been back to his bossy, active self since Friday. We're glad he is better and hope he's healthy for awhile!

All his medications and his nebulizer

Wiped out

Holding his "smells" machine