I began to wonder if I needed to go to pediatric emergency care with my son.
Indeed, he had been diagnosed with pneumonia a week earlier, but he didn’t seem to be recovering. But here Ethan was in classic his two-and-a-half mode.
He stuffed his mouth with the pirate loot I had hurriedly tossed into my purse, then reverted to his wild banshee ways and ran around in circles again.
Our pediatrician referred us to this place after saying that their office was full of sick children and could not see us. is what they said. In a packed waiting room, I struggled to find a seat as far away from other coughing children as possible.
We finally graduated from the waiting room to the doctor’s office, but Ethan continued his marathon by scooting back and forth in his rolling chair, giggling every time he hit the examination table. Although disruptive, I felt the need to defend myself for wasting her time on this visit with seemingly A-OK’s son.
But Ethan wasn’t okay.
The doctor listened to his chest with a stethoscope, but didn’t like what she heard: wheezing, crackling.
She told us how the loot-filled stomachs move wildly every time Ethan’s pirate inhales and exhales.
They had Ethan complete a nebulizer treatment at the office. This meant slipping a device resembling an oxygen mask over my face, and medicated air to open my lungs flowed through a frighteningly large machine. I hold him in my lap while the nebulizer is on, and on YouTube he finds 100 different versions of the “Wheels on the Bus” video, from the hum of a machine like a vacuum cleaner. I tried to distract him.
The doctor listened to his lungs again. She still couldn’t hear his breathing, but she said the hospital was too flooded right now.
I knew what she meant. A few days before our emergency visit, she flagged a report for the editors of The Hill that Washington-area children’s hospitals were at capacity and overrun with young children suffering from RSV. rice field. .
After a three-hour visit, she gave Ethan steroids and told us to follow up with his pediatrician the next day.
By the time I got to the pediatrician’s office the next morning, my carefree, playful little guy was nothing. I had a similar routine. His oxygen level was too low, so the pediatrician put him on another nebulizer treatment.
“Our goal is to keep you out of the hospital,” the pediatrician told us.
It seemed like an unusual “goal” for a doctor, but I could understand the reasoning. However, after Ethan’s oxygen levels dropped even further after the nebulizer, she said she should take him to the hospital immediately.
My “Blue’s Clues” and ride-obsessed son is usually the epitome of the “I can do it myself!” I couldn’t put him down for a moment while we waited in the emergency room lobby. Surprisingly, the separate waiting room for children in the ER wasn’t completely full.
it’s not.
“He’s so cute,” a young mother in the waiting room tells me, gesticulating at Ethan’s curly head. She held her two-month-old baby in her arms and patiently rocked her baby after she said she waited three hours.
I hugged Ethan as my husband rushed from work to the hospital where he met us and was driven to the ER triage area. , then sent us back to the waiting room.
Finally they called Ethan’s name and we were in the ER. My vibrant, otherwise healthy child lay listless and cloudy-eyed on me. We struggled to get the two of them onto the one adult examination table. They draped a lead apron over me and Ethan and took an X-ray of his small lungs. A nurse placed a cannula in Ethan’s nose for supplemental oxygen and hydrated his arm with an IV before wrapping him in a diaper to keep him from trying to remove the tube.
My husband and I were freaking out over what was going on and laughed at the diapers being used MacGyver-style. He explained that he had done this operation with his children.
An ER doctor finally came to our room and gave us a crash course on what was to come.
“We’ve been flying kids to Pittsburgh and sometimes Richmond,” he added. The hospital had a pediatric department, but no intensive care unit for children. If Ethan’s condition deteriorates further, they won’t be able to treat him there.
It was a belly punch. When her doctor left, her husband saw Ethan falling asleep with her mask on as the nebulizer blared for another treatment.
“He’s just a baby. He shouldn’t be here,” my husband said.
Finally the pediatrician came into the room. She examined her Ethan and explained to us how they had been dealing with the same problem, RSV, one after another.
But she gave us hope. He could go to the pediatrics department of the hospital. We don’t have to travel to care for him unless he gets worse.Ethan’s bed was made 10 hours after he was first admitted to the hospital.
We are among the lucky ones. Beyond air travel, many families were said to have spent many nights in the ER because there were no beds.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan (Republican) announced last week that hospitals will receive $25 million in additional funding from the state to prioritize pediatric intensive care unit staffing. According to Hogan’s office, 57% of his hospitalizations in the last week were children between birth and his 2-year-old.
Next to the Halloween ghost decorations that adorn the doors of the children’s ward, each room had the same notice taped to them: Quarantine Guidelines. It was full, RSV was everywhere.
There is no cure for RSV. Every two hours, the nurse gave Ethan a nebulizer treatment.
A new study released by Pfizer showed that vaccinated pregnant women helped protect newborns from a common but deadly respiratory virus that fills hospitals with wheezing babies every fall. (CDC via AP)
A monitor attached to his leg alerted nurses that his oxygen was dangerously low, and it did so several times during the first night. I thought I would ask, but I didn’t want to know the answer, so I didn’t.
The goal was to be able to breathe well twice in a row for at least 4 hours between treatments without needing additional oxygen.
That seemingly simple goal remained elusive for two full days. I initially thought it would be a nightmare to try to put a 2-year-old in a hospital bed for longer than her five minutes, but Ethan was very unwell and made very little fuss. And just after midnight on the second day in the hospital, Ethan suddenly regained his spirits.
He got up and rolled over in his hospital bed. He then rolled over my head, stretched his arms and legs as far as he could, and chuckled.
“Can I sleep here?” he cracked himself up.
It seems that someone pressed the power button on my child and suddenly he turned back on. It didn’t matter that it was midnight. Before my next nebulizer treatment, I had to have a very disrupted sleep.
One nurse later said she enjoyed working with children.
After that, my doctor recommended that I try increasing the interval between treatments. Finally, he was told he was stable enough to go home. When I cried
It was a nightmare experience, but I realize how lucky my family is.
My husband and I have a job that allows us to let everything go when our son needs help, we have health insurance, and we have the resources to get us through our days in the hospital.
Perhaps most importantly, we were lucky enough to have access to an incredible team of doctors and nurses to secure a bed for our son at an unprecedented and unthinkable time for the hospital.
Thank you for believing in your instincts, even at the risk of repeating one parenting cliché that would have rolled your eyes a week ago. Even when Ethan was in emergency care, I knew something was wrong. What I didn’t know was how much he was struggling to breathe.
At the hospital after discharge, Ethan and I waited in the lobby while my husband picked us up and pulled the car out of the parking lot. Ethan found an empty wheelchair in the corner of the lobby and she quickly ran over. He giggled as he tried to roll one of the chairs into the automatic door.
.
