Hello,
I hope your summer has gone well.
Believe it or not, the coughing Grace was starting on the day of her dance recital, was the beginning of a very long month for us.
She ended up in the hospital for a couple days by the end of June!
That coughing started up late the night of June 10th, and she was coughing quite a bit the day of her dance recital, so she was on cough suppressants, and seemed to be OK. I figured she was having an allergy thing.
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| This is her posing at the recital with some friends, Singing: "Rotten Smelly Life..." from "Hard Knock Life," Annie. |
We took her to the doctor that Monday, (dance audition day, so much for that...) and they put her on an antibiotic. We left for Disney on the following Saturday.
It got worse daily while we were gone, and by the 20th she was waking up each morning coughing- which would make her sick, but then she would be mostly fine the rest of the day, other than a few coughing fits. She was taking cough suppressant and Zofran, a nausea medicine in pill form, daily along with her allergy medicine.
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| Tuesday June 21st at Epcot. |
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| Tuesday night, not feeling as great in the evenings. |
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| Wednesday afternoon, June 22nd. (Very hot out.) |
By Thursday, she was very quiet, and coughing a lot, which made her vomit, even several times at Hollywood Studios. We left about 5pm. We swung by the Lego store, which was the only thing Thomas had been asking to do all week. They had fun there building and shopping.
Luckily we were listening to Harry Potter in the car, so we were all excited to head home.
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| Thursday June 23rd, right before we hit the road, and after playing at the Lego store. She was feeling pretty good right then. |
As the night went on, and the kids slept on, (Sam and I drove straight through- other than a 3-hour nap around Chattanooga, thanks to a very serious storm,) Grace would sleep, wake up coughing/vomiting, and pass out again, more and more frequently.
Things seemed a bit better that day, she even went to lunch with my family, to tell them all about the trip, (although she had a coughing fit in McAlister's and scared everyone. She told the manager when he came to check on her, "I do this all the time.")
Sam had left as soon as we got to Louisville to take Thomas on a youth trip for church, and by the time we knew there was serious trouble, they were long gone. We had to stay in touch by text. He said they would come home if we needed them to.
On Saturday, I got her back in at the doctor. Dr. Cowley sent her for a chest X-ray. They called to say she had pneumonia.
The doctor put her on a different cough medicine, expectorant, and they changed the antibiotic she had been on all week, which was sort of pointless, since she couldn't keep almost anything down at that point. Sam's parents and my Mom came over for the day.
Grace woke, late Saturday afternoon, when everyone else was gone (of course) with a major coughing fit, and she had a fever of 103.9!
I called the doctor back and she told us that if Grace couldn't keep the antibiotic or cough medicine down, she had to go to the ER. They called in a orally dissolving Zofran, (the nausea stuff) to be sure that it stayed down, but warned that it probably wouldn't help with this kind of vomiting. It didn't.
We started having her take the medicine, and then be perfectly still for an hour. If she kept it down for an hour, we said it counted. Sometimes she did, sometimes she didn't. But over all, she seemed better, probably because being very still prevent the coughing and vomiting, but that wasn't going to get the gunk out of her system.
Sam and Thomas got home Sunday night, and oddly, Grace seemed ok for a bit, maybe because, "Daddy and Thomas are home." But she was really sleeping a lot.
Monday morning she woke up coughing, as usual, but then it went on and on. She would stop for an hour and do it again. Then she ate jello, and it made her sick. Then she had a Powerade, and it made her sick.
She's just too tiny to be getting sick every hour for several days. And of course, throwing up is scary, and it was happening almost every hour to hour and a half, for around 3 days, (and that was after throwing up at least once a day for 2 weeks now!) Twice she stopping getting sick and said, "Help me." and "Make this stop." I was heart broken. She was dizzy, and had a terrible headache most of the time now.
At 3am on Tuesday the 28th, she woke up coughing, vomiting and crying.
I told her I would keep fighting through this with her as long as she wanted to, but when she was ready to just go on down and let the doctors deal with this at the hospital, I would go with her. She nodded and said, "I want to go." Honestly, I was relieved.
I texted Mom, saying I was leaving, told Sam, who agreed to stay with Thomas, and then Mom texted back and said she wanted to go to. Grace and I walked across to her house, and Mom and I took Grace to the ER at Kosair Brownsboro.
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| Getting ready to go in ambulance from Kosair Brownsboro to Downtown, about 10am. |
They repeated the chest X-Ray, started an IV.
She seemed totally fine, as they always do when you take them to the doctor. After an hour, they were going to send us home. The nurse even removed the O2 sensor, and disconnected the IV from the fluids.
The doctor sent in a Powerade. Grace looked at me like, "Are they crazy?" I just said, "It's ok, just drink a little bit." I haven't ever prayed that someone would get sick before, but I did then. Mom admitted later she had too.
I just knew she wouldn't and we would have to go home. But, God is good, and she pretty intensely spit every bit of it up. And the nurse came in right at the end of it.
The Pulmonologist looked shocked. He said, "Well, with all those fluids, (indicating the IV) she should have been able to keep that down. She can't even keep liquids down." Um....that's what we said.....
He was back in a minute to say they were transferring her via ambulance to the Downtown Hospital. They put her on IV Zofran, IV antibiotics (both a 1 time thing,) and back on constant IV fluids. She finally fell asleep.
She slept through them transferring her to the ambulance bed, and riding in the ambulance and admission downtown and a check up, other than when they forced her to stand up to be weighed, then she passed out again. She slept through everything else too, from 8am to 2:30pm. Although when we asked her later if she remembered the ambulance, she said, "It was bumpy."
She was so deeply asleep by the time we got downtown, that she didn't wake up at all, not even when they drew blood!
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| Sleeping Tuesday Morning at Kosair after IV Zofran, Fluids, and IV Antibiotics. |
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| Tuesday morning right before they moved the O2 Sensor to her toe, she's showing it to the camera on her finger. |
We stayed for 2 days, mostly for fluids. But you could visibly see her improving hour by hour. She had a lot of fun when she got to talk to her cousins on facetime and later to her friends Conner and Caleb on speaker phone. I had forgotten that basically she hadn't seen or talked to anyone since about June 8th before her recital!
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| Wednesday morning after getting up and walking around the room some. |
After some testing, they told us that she had had mono, at some point recently, which had gone away by June, although we had no idea she had even it, and that had left her immune system very weak, thus the pneumonia. Also, that she might have caught some additional virus that started all the vomiting when we were in Disney, with pneumonia, and unaware of it, but her main doctor didn't seem to buy that at all.
She felt much better by the time we left the hospital. Although she was still vomiting almost every time she coughed, but was at least able to eat and drink again.
We stayed in the house for 2 more weeks almost totally. If we left, she had to take a little garbage can with her...cause, you know...she could be sick at any moment.
She had to go back to the doctor to get checked 2 more times. The latest was this past Friday, because she was supposed to leave for camp yesterday!
Dr. Cowley said she was 100% over the pneumonia, but that yes, she would still cough for awhile. In my opinion, from June 10th-July 26th is actually a while, and it should stop now. But whatever. My current prayer is that she will have a day again soon when she can't exactly remember how awful it is to throw up, like most of the rest of us feel usually. And that she will get to the point that she isn't pulling a garbage can nearby her all the time, just in case.
She is still coughing some but it seems the worst is over. Thankfully.
She is actually at camp this week, can you imagine? Now I'm trying not to be stressed... Hard to walk away from her after all of that!!!
Blessed to be past it!
MJ
