say goodbye to room 435…

after pain meds and before breathing treatment in the ER.

We spent most of last night in the ER waiting for a bed. Apparently there are a lot of sick people these days and the hospital was short of rooms. After a four hour wait we arrived in Room 435. 


We got Miss Courtney into a gown, attached to all the machinery needed to monitor her oxygen levels and her heart rate and settled in. She was in the Telemetry Unit at Fair Oaks which is sort of a step down ICU. It’s the first time she has been on an adult unit for a hospital stay. I can’t say I am big fan. I miss my happy rainbow colored rooms and smiling caricatures on the wall. 


Around 10 p.m. the party really got going with Miss Courtney having not one, not two but three grand-mal seizures within a 25 minute span. There were alarms going off, Doctors yelling orders for oxygen and Ativan and who knows what else. It’s all a blur now. 


Needless to say, it had been some time since they had had an intractable seizure patient on the floor and we had them on their toes from the get go. 


Leave it to my Courtney to be such a drama queen. 


Once she had their attention, she calmed down. The second round of IV antibiotics were hung and the first breathing treatment was scheduled…for 1 a.m.


1 a.m.??? Are you kidding me???


No, they were not kidding. The respiratory therapist showed his perky little self at 1 a.m. full mask and meds in hand. Miss Courtney thought it was hysterical and laughed through the whole thing.

1 a.m. giggles

Then the happy little therapist showed up again at 4 a.m. and Court had another little nebulizer party laughing once more. This is of course after she had been woken up three times already for other monitoring and testing. 


I have had three venti lattes today and I could still sleep for a month.


This morning the gang arrived about 7 a.m. for rounds. Pulmonary, Neurology, Infectious Disease, Nurse Manager, Social Worker, and so on. I repeated Courtney’s history and the happenings o the previous day about 50 trillion times it seemed and they all agreed that once her lungs showed improvement they would get her out of there as soon as possible. They didn’t want her to pick up anything else as she has been known to do during a prolonged hospital stay. 


After rounds, good things started to happen. Jerry brought me my first latte before heading into work. An hour later my beautiful friend Sharon W showed up with another latte and a scone. Bliss!


Mr. Fred from St. Veronicas came by with Communion for all three of us. Amazing! 


Then Fr. Barkett, our pastor, came by to anoint my girl. Her lungs sounded much improved and the coughing was minimal by this afternoon. 

Drugs are good!!

The Docs had a little round table (in the hallway) and decided that she was improved enough with the four courses of IV antibiotics and breathing treatments, that we could consider taking her home. We caught the pneumonia in it’s earliest stages and they knew she was going home to a good situation. They also had three new cases come in with various infectious illnesses and we concerned that she would come in contact with something much harder for her to fight. 


Bazinga!! Score one for the compromised immune system!!


Goodbye Room 435!


A few hours later, with heavy dosage of oral antibiotics to be given over the next seven days in hand we are home with our beautiful girl. We have a no visitor rule for the next four days per doctors orders and she will need pretty close monitoring with her g-tube feeds and output so there is no more strain put in the lungs from inside or out. 


I am confident in our ability to meet her needs her at home with our physicians team a phone call away.  


As I type this, my daughter is sitting next to me, bathed and jammied, smiling and drooling, happy to be home. 


No more happy than her family is to have her here.  


God is good ALL the time. Thanks so much for your prayers and good wishes. PLEASE keep them coming. As much as I am looking forward to sleeping in my own bed, Courtney still needs monitoring care over the next 3-4 days. So prayers for me to be able to meet her needs would be greatly appreciated. 


Thanks all for being there for us once again.