man, i haven't posted here in a long time. lots of things have prevented my posting, mainly things of the professional variety. in short, my company decided to lay off roughly 1/3 of its workforce and i didn't know if i'd be one of them. turns out, i'm safe. anyway, more changes are imminent, but i won't write about them until they become locked down.
on to thanksgiving. hope everyone had a good one. our actual thanksgiving day was fun. my family came over and the weather was nice and cold, which i always like this time of year, even though we rarely seem to get it. we had four children under the age of six, which adds a little bit to the holidays, in my opinion.
the friday after thanksgiving, however, was not so fun. our youngest boy, who is now eight and a half months old, had been dealing with a cough for most of the week. he was still eating ok and didn't seem lethargic or anything like that. friday morning, he took a turn for the worse. he was breathing like he was running a marathon; something like seventy five breaths per minute, or just about double of where it should be. luckily, our doctor was open, so i took him in just before 10:00 am.
once we got back to the exam room, they did the usual checks and rigged his little baby hand up to a device that measures his pulse oxygen. normally, you'd want to see numbers up near 100, as they are percentages of oxygen saturation. hudson's were upper 80s, which weren't eye poppingly bad, but certainly weren't good. what made his case so dire was that he was breathing so fast in addition to the low saturation. basically, he was having to work too hard to get air. once he got too tired to breathe at that pace, he wouldn't get enough oxygen and would turn blue or worse. so......he was hospitalized.
now, he was also hospitalized back in october for a different respiratory issue as well. he stayed overnight and was released the next morning, as he tested negative for RSV, which is a fairly serious respiratory problem in babies. in hindsight, he did not need to be hospitalized that time, which made us a little hesitant to go in this time. even the nurses the previous time wondered why we weren't just treating his symptoms at home. $2,000 and one sleepless night later, he was discharged.
anyway, this time was different, as he was clearly suffering, and the thought of him running out of air, scared the ever-loving shit out of me. the doctor said she was pretty sure he had RSV and that we were probably looking at a multiple night hospital stay. i phoned my wife, broke the bad news, and went over to check in.
the first hour we were there was absolutely awful. the poor little guy was huffing and puffing, had a fever, and was getting dehydrated because he wouldn't take his formula. it didn't help matters that he was being shuffled around the hospital for all the initial things that needed to be done. first was the chest x-ray. they basically sit him on this apparatus with his legs dangling down and then lift his arms up over his head. then they close this long plastic tube up around his sides, pinning his arms up and squishing him. obviously, this would not be fun for any baby, much less one that was sick with fever and who could hardly breathe. it was a little difficult to watch, as a parent.
next was the worst. he needed an IV so that he could be hydrated and receive antibiotics (did i mention he also had a double ear infection?). being dehydrated and being a fat little baby were two big strikes against this process being easy. the nurses had to jab him three different times before getting into a vein and being able to draw blood out for his blood work. it took about twenty minutes, with a break in between where they had to bring in a different nurse. he screamed and cried the entire time. his little cheeks were flushed and tears just rolled down the sides of his face. as hard as it was for him, i think it maybe was harder for my wife and me.
so now we get back to the room, which oddly enough, is the exact same room we had in october. being hooked up to an IV, a pulse ox monitor, and an oxygen tube in his nose (which he tried to knock out for the first half hour and was actually taped to his cheeks), made it necessary to stay in roughly the same six by six little square. anyone who has ever had a baby or babysat for another's baby knows that this is hell. if you're at home, you can constantly switch things up for the baby, thus keeping him occupied. he can sit in his swing, he can play on the floor, you can walk him around, etc. here, it was crib, chair, or stand with him. the crib had an insanely loud metal gate that crashed when you closed it. so on the rare occasions where he fell into a sound sleep, the gate usually ruined that. luckily, there was a toy room and i picked out a few that he seemed to like in moderation.
his RSV test came back positive and we were told that one other baby had just checked out that day AFTER A TEN DAY STAY! i'll fast forward through most of the long, long hours of being in that room and just hit the highlights of his stay.
(1) friday night around 10:30, after my wife had gone home for the night to take care of the dog, his IV tube popped out. the needle stayed in, but the tube popped out. he had been sleeping and then woke up and rolled over. i guess it came out at this point. when i went to pick him up to change and feed him, my hand got all wet. i flipped on the light and noticed blood everywhere. it looked like a manson family crime scene in his crib. i ran out to get the nurses and they spent the next half hour cutting away the old tape (you have to tape the IV tubes down really heavily on babies) and getting him set up again. of course, he screamed the whole time and there was nothing i could do but watch, on the verge of losing it and sobbing along with him.
(2) the pulse oxygen monitor would beep really loudly if his pulse ox level dropped too low. with him being so small, when he'd move around, the machine couldn't read him and would therefore register too low. this beeping probably happened every five or ten minutes throughout the night, meaning i couldn't sleep because i'd have to get up and mute the machine, which would last about two minutes.
(3) he was receiving breathing treatments every three hours and the regular nurse would come in to check his vitals about every four hours. they did not do these all at once, so someone was in the room constantly. i think i slept about fifteen minutes friday night and my wife probably slept five minutes saturday night.
(4) in response to the concentrated antibiotics he was receiving, he starting blowing out his pants like it was a contest. he went through probably six pairs of pants in two days. just absolutely blowing his mess up his back and out the sides. he was wearing a little hospital gown for a shirt and he probably went through ten of those due to spit up, blood, or crap.
(5) i think i ate about fifteen containers of pudding from the "nourishment" center.
another thing that made all this hard was that we didn't really get to see our oldest boy. we shipped him off to his grandpa's house friday night and then his grandmother came to stay at our house with him saturday. i hated seeing him for five minutes at a time and having to tell him that i was going back to the hospital. he knew that baby hudson was sick, but he didn't really get why mommy and daddy were never home together and never for long separately either.
the whole time all this was going on, our concern for hudson lessened a bit, as he was getting better and we were already through the worst of it. bit by bit, our concern turned to the financials of it all. like i said, our first overnight stay cost $2K, as we had to meet the deductible. even though that has been met, i don't really want to think about what our share of this stay will be. it could be that hudson's xmas present is hospital care.
i probably thought in my head about fifty times that i would trade places with him if i could. he's just so small and helpless that it's like being repeatedly punched in the gut to watch him in pain. that's the one thing that has been so hard for me having kids; the feeling of helplessness when they're sick. it's just so scary when something like this happens to babies or little kids because they're so vulnerable and you get surprised all over again the depth of your own feelings towards them. i know that probably sounds silly and that you should always be aware of how much you love them, but it is beyond any terror i've ever known to think that something awful could happen to them. i hesitate to write it, but it's almost as though you don't even want kids at that point because it's just easier to not love something that much and to not be that emotionally invested and therefore at risk of an even greater hurt.
but we made it through this time. sunday morning when i got to the hospital, the doctor caught me in the hall and said that hudson had slept the night without needing the oxygen tube and could go home. i was insanely happy and more than a little proud that my boy recovered so well.
so what if we didn't get to lounge around, fat and happy, after thanksgiving. so what if we'll postpone putting the tree up another week. the bottom line is that we're all home now, we're all relatively healthy and things could have been a lot worse. consider us thankful.