WHEW!!! So sorry about that absence, I was working on a pretty neat project, which I will inform you about at a later date and time. *TEASER*, I know!
Well, I'm just going to jump right back in here. So we'll go right back to Dec of 08, Liv was released from the hospital and healing rather nicely from her surgery. That is, until 12/29/2008, when she woke in the middle of the night coughing and lips turning blue from having difficulty breathing. Now, I'm a fairly calm person and typically good under pressure so I give her a breathing treatment right away and call Children's. All seems to be going okay and Liv started recovering, for all of about 10 mins and the whole thing started over again. I again, gave her a breathing treatment and waited on the nurse to call back (she promised she would within 20 mins to check on the situation). The situation was anything but okay and I rushed Liv to the ER where they came pretty close to intubating her. Finally, after a slew of breathing treatments, IV steroids and raising her heart rate to some seriously scary levels, she was breathing pretty decently again. You could tell the nurses were concerned with her heart rate, I mean, when I saw it go over 200 beats MY heart rate started racing. Somewhere in there the nurse and I got our instincts in sync. We both looked up at the heart monitor, looked at each other, nodded (seriously...it was totally unspoken communication here), the nurse turned the lights off and I quickly got into this tiny little bed with Liv. I laid her on my tummy/chest and just rubbed her head and back. The power of a mother's touch is something I will never fully grasp, but within minutes Liv was sleeping and quickly reaching a normal heart rate again.
About a half hour later, the nurse returned and thanked me for keeping my composure, I tell ya...those nurse/Dr "kudos" mean so much to hear in these kinds of situations. She also informed me that they were preparing a room upstairs as Liv was being admitted. Um...did I mention this was almost New Years Eve? That's two holidays in one month that we ALMOST spent in the hospital and honestly, even that is okay, as long as my girl is healthy.
We spent the night and were discharged early afternoon on the 30th. Basically what happened was all tied to Liv's immune system. Since she had just had surgery, her already sketchy immune system (I'll explain why it's sketchy later in this post) was being compramised. Somewhere between being discharged after her surgery and her repeat visit to the hospital she'd picked up a respiratory virus that turned into a small case of fluid in her lungs, not pneumonia though. Yay for a happy and healthy New Years Eve the next day .... we brought it in sleeping. :)
**Her already sketchy immune system is due to her having the food allergies. Basically, an allergy is caused by the immune system over-reacting to a normally safe protein. You see, when Liv encounters one of her allergens and has so many symptoms, those are all caused because her immune system sees that allergen as "the enemy". The immune system starts going insane and attacking itself in an effort to rid the body of "the enemy."***
No comments:
Post a Comment