Bustin' out

Lydia had a good night and will be home as soon as the red tape monsters are appeased. Yay!

RSV

Lydia definitely has RSV (a virus), but there are hints of a bacterial infection too, though that won't be clear until culture results return tomorrow.

In any case, she looks a lot better this morning after a few doses of antibiotic, and she is down from breathing 40% to 28% O2.

Still looking like discharge Thursday or Friday. I'll post updates here.

She’s baaaack!

Lydia is back at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, but we are not too worried at this point.

On that picture I posted the other day, her cheeks were flushed, she’d been tired, and she had had a runny nose. That all continued over the weekend, with a good dose of clinginess, and she stayed home from school today. But this evening she started looking worse around 5p.m. We took her in to the ER because she was not consistently keeping her oxygen saturation above 90% even on 5 liters per minute of O2 by trach collar, which is the practical maximum that we can give her at home.

She perked up some with some albuterol and Tylenol, and didn’t look too bad in the ER, on oxygen, but a chest X-ray showed an infiltrate in her right lung and probably starting on the left too. So even though it still seems likely to be a viral pneumonia, she is being admitted for i.v. (and inhaled) antibiotics, at least until cultures come back and her oxygenation perks up. Besides, we don’t say “just a virus” around here too much since our PICU adventure 2 years ago.

Lydia was a trouper in the ER tonight. She cried when her i.v. was being put in, but otherwise she was pretty stoic. And she got to show off her i.v. house to big sister Rose and say “hurt” over Skype. Winona is staying with Lydia overnight, because it is hard to separate mommy bear from her cub. I’d guess that Lydia will be in for 1 to 3 days depending on lab results, assuming there are no surprises.

Otherwise we are doing OK, and Jon and I will manage fine on our brief bachelor buddy adventure. I will try to keep this page updated with any good or bad news.

Lydia at 4+11/12

Lydia wanted to take advantage of an unseasonably warm day yesterday to write with sidewalk chalk. Dad did the writing, but Lydia could read every name, and she even helped spell some of them.