Late last night Rich and I were watching a movie when we heard a croupy sounding cough. This sound is fairly common around our house whenever one of our “trach kids” is sick. Since none of our kids was sick we thought it was just a random, funny sounding cough. About 30 minutes later we heard it again, so Rich hopped up to see whose room it was coming from and it was Eva. Since being decanulated, this was the first time we’ve heard her have any sort of obstruction in her airway so we freaked out a bit and Rich grabbed her out of bed. She was really wheezing and having a hard time swallowing. She had shown no signs of being sick at all and the onset was an hour and a half after putting her to bed so the only thing we could think that could be happening to her was some sort of allergic reaction to the food we ate at the restaurant that night.
She was really struggling and we weren’t really sure where the ER was and Rich was scared to take her alone, without me in the back making sure she was still breathing so he called 911. Within 5 minutes there were 8 or 9 men in my tiny living room surrounding Eva. Of course, by then she had become much more alert and was able to better control her breathing. For a minute I started to wonder if we had jumped in to calling 911 too quickly but they assured us that we did the right thing. Every second was unpredictable when we got her up. We didn’t want to risk waiting it out and or attempting to make the 15 minute drive, by ourselves, without any way to open her airway if it completely obstructed.
They monitored her while they called their headquarters to ask if they should drive her in to the ER by ambulance or let us take her. They were instructed to take her by ambulance because of her history and the risk so off we went for Eva’s second ambulance ride, the first being her transport to Primary Children’s after birth. Her breathing was stable enough that I felt I had to get a picture, for her life history book(my blog).
When we got to the hospital they gave her an oral steroid called dexamethasone and a breathing treatment of albuterol. She was upset about the breathing treatment and it really exacerbated her already inflamed airway. The only thing that called her down was daddy rubbing her head.
It took a good hour and a half for her breathing to normalize and then she was back to her normal self. Here she is showing daddy her mint.
She was clearly ready to go home so off we went with a back-up syringe of dexamethasone in case she needed it again. We are so grateful for our neighbor, Millie, who chilled on our couch until 3am. We are also very grateful that it wasn’t more serious and that she had a very quick recovery from what started out as a really scary moment.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Drop me a line!