Thursday, May 1, 2014

The Noels vs. Every Illness You Can Think Of

What a month this has been!  
I apologize for being absent from the blog for a while, but we've been dealing with sickness after sickness after sickness!

It all started 3 weeks ago today (Thursday, April 10th) .  Becks woke up in the middle of the night (around 11pm) coughing.  It was a pretty bad cough.  We put him in the steam shower, made him some hot tea, and sat up with him in our bed until he started to doze back off to sleep.  We put him in his bed and went back to bed ourselves.  About two hours later we heard the most horrible coughing noise coming from the monitor.  When I went to check on him, the panic in his face was clear...he couldn't breathe. He was trying so hard to catch his breath, but the coughing was constant and his breaths were shallow and far apart.  We frantically put him in the car and Blaine took off to the emergency room just a few miles from our house.  He spent about an hour at the ER and they diagnosed him with severe croup. His oxygen levels were way too low so they gave him 2 epinephrine nebulizer treatments and did a few x-rays to check his lungs and air ways.


       The doctor called Dell Children's Hospital and they decided it would be best for Beckett to spend the night there.  However, because of the medicine they gave him, he had to be monitored by a medical professional for the next 12 hours, so they sent an ambulance to pick him up and transport him to DCH.



Here's our little trooper after his ride in the ambulance. 
He is all smiles, even though it's now 3 in the morning and that IV in his arm took 3 different attempts to get right!


After admitting him to the hospital, he got to go up to his room and finally get a little rest. Our poor baby had been through so much that night.


 

 

He woke up the next morning starving and feeling pretty good.  
He was tired and a little pale, but his oxygen levels were climbing back up to the normal range so we were able to take him home around noon that day.

  But when we got back home, he just wasn't acting like himself. And to top it off, he started running a fever.  We kept him in bed with us at night to monitor his coughing/breathing.

Little man just didn't have any energy and wouldn't sleep for more than 3 hours at a time.
We were all exhausted.


By Sunday night, not only was his fever pretty high, but his coughing was really bad again. We took him up the urgent care center near our house. His oxygen levels were low again. They did a blood work panel on him to check for an infection, but it came back negative. 

 However, the doctor still thought there was something in his lungs causing him problems.  He decided to treat him with a dose of antibiotics for pneumonia (of course it was a shot...so if you're keeping count, that 5 needle pokes in 3 days)

   Beckett's finger after getting pricked for blood work.

We took him to the pediatrician on Monday morning to do a follow up from everything that had happened over the weekend.  He reviewed the information from both the emergency room, Dell Children's Hospital, and the urgent care facility from the night before. He agreed that this was definitely croup and most likely caused by adenovirus. He said that we would just need to let it run it's course.  But, after listening to his chest he changed his mind and sent us immediately to go get more x-rays to check (again) for pneumonia. 

The second set of x-rays came back clear. 
Our only option was to treat the cough with steam showers and a table spoon of honey as often as needed.  His fever broke on Monday, so our instructions were to only worry if the fever came back.

Well guess what...it came back!
So the following Monday, back to the pediatrician we went to find out what was wrong.

*Oh, and in between our first pediatrician visit on Monday and our second pediatrician visit  the following Monday, we also got to go in on Wednesday for Presley.  She had pink eye!!!

Okay...back to Beckett.  Long story short, when we took him back to the doctor he tested positive for the flu!


 
So for the next few days...this is what we did at our house. Rest, rest, and more rest.

Beckett finally started to feel better around Thursday.  Just in time for me to get two great pieces of news.  First...Blaine now had pink eye and bronchitis (and we're pretty sure the flu too...but he didn't get tested for it)

 Second, I got a call from Presley's school telling me that she fell on the sidewalk during recess scraping her forehead, busting her lip and chin, and here's the best part...possibly broke her nose!

Good news is her nose was not broken.  But she was pretty bruised and banged up.

I'm happy to report now that after 3 weeks, everyone is finally feeling much better.  But I don't want to see the inside of another doctor's office, hospital, or even a pharmacy for a very very very long time!!!

By the way, did anyone notice who did not get sick through all of this?  That's right...Momma! 
That's because hidden somewhere in some ancient scroll, written thousands of years ago, it clearly says that if you are the mom, your aren't allowed to get sick, ever. 
 It's the truth...look it up.