You're so Vein

Or in Landon’s case, not vein. He’s been congested for 2 weeks and the doctor said to suction him out with saline, but as long as he didn’t have a fever – or that his fever couldn’t be broken with Tylenol, that we were ok. This past Friday his fever reached 102.9°F, I gave him Tylenol and after 2 hours it had only come down to 101.5°F. We were in Gun Barrel, so we headed to the ER at the hospital where Grandma Wood works. First order of business is to rule out RSV – so they did the swab and it came back negative. Then they ordered a CBC. The kid has ninja veins. They tried twice to start an IV – and when that didn’t work, they collected the blood from a heel stick. The CBC came back with a really high white blood cell count, so he was clearly fighting off something. Then they ordered the X-ray. The X-ray showed pneumonia. So they arranged for an ER to ER transfer to Children’s in Dallas. Where we were treated like we had come in with a kid with the sniffles. They ordered another CBC – which meant another try to get a vein, they got the blood sample, but couldn’t get the IV. Their CBC still came back high – but that doctor thought it was viral. They deep suctioned him, cleaned out his nasal cavity, and sent us packing.

Luckily for us, the doctor who saw him first called to check up on him the next day. He had shown the X-ray to another doctor locally and one in Houston, and all 4 (including the second one from the night before) agreed that it was pneumonia and when he heard we had been released from Children’s and not admitted, and not even been given anything to deal with the infection, he called in a prescription for him.

All in all – over the weekend, he had his first ER visit, his (and my) first ambulance ride, his first X-ray, his first dealing with a Doctor who didn’t seem to know what she was doing, and his first Christmas.

Yesterday we went to check in with his pediatrician, and he said what we did was good and that the antibiotic we had for him should be plenty, he agreed that with that high of a white blood cell count that he would have had the same diagnosis. And as we left, we were checking out, and the mom in front of us turned as said “Does your baby have pneumonia too? We spent Christmas in the ER.” And in a weird way – it was kind of comforting that we were not the only ones.

So the good news is that we caught it early and he’s recovering nicely – we still have a couple days of antibiotics to go though. He’s a trooper and was called the “best looking sick kid ever.”

When I enrolled him in day care I completely expected that he’d have ear infections and get sick – I did not expect pneumonia. We went to get all his stuff from the day care yesterday. While we figure out our plan, his Grandma Logan and his cousin Ashley will be taking care of him during the day for the next month.