Pneumonia and Recovery

About 6 weeks after Verity's overnight hospital stay in March, we were back again after monitoring her at home being unable to keep her sats up. I had taken a nap in the early evening, knowing it was going to be a rough night, and spent hours tweaking her o2 and watching the numbers fluctuate on the pulse oximeter. When her heart rate soared over 200 and wouldn't come down, I woke Ted and we packed up for the hospital.

Unlike the previous ER visit, this one involved lots of tests. We were admitted with the diagnosis of aspiration pneumonia. Since I had been awake all night, I drove home after Ted and Verity finished the admissions process, swapping out with him the following day (and bringing a diffuser plus essential oils, lol).

The scariest part of the whole thing was watching Verity's labored breathing. Her retractions were unlike anything I had ever seen. I was hoping to get her on CPAP or BiPAP, something that we felt would ease the difficulty she was having with her breathing, but they only do that in the PICU (at this particular hospital), and we were in the pediatric acute care unit. (Don't ask me why they can't bring it to those rooms!!) The doctors did listen to my concerns and said they were monitoring her to see if she needed to move to PICU. She never did. Amazingly the nights were not too terrible; it was the afternoons where she seemed to have the acute episodes.

This visit was three days and two nights, and once again we were discharged to come home on oxygen (1/16L prescribed, but we did have to adjust depending on her sats). Verity had an IV in the hospital, but we were given a prescription for "oral" (i.e. G-tube) antibiotics at home. Thankfully she did not have any adverse reactions to the medicine.

It has been about 3 weeks since our hospital visit, and we have had a number of appointments since then (many unrelated to her pneumonia). Overall she is doing quite well, although she has been noticeably sleepy (regrettably not always during the night--hence my writing this at 2:30am!). Every now and then we see a low grade fever, and she has had days where getting a smile out of her is nigh impossible. But for all the fussy periods, she does have her happy, playful times as well, and thankfully her vitals keep looking good. She came off oxygen maybe a week or so after we got home from the hospital. (These weeks have been a blur with all our appointments, which I will detail in a separate post.)

I am thankful Verity seems to be robust and healthy enough to bounce back so well from such a scary illness. But I confess that I will never be able to shake the sense of dread that looms over us whenever we are making a hurried trip to the hospital--we've seen too many babies fly to heaven to take for granted that we will always be able to bring her home.