Brandt, Children's Hospital, and Bronchiolitis

No, nothing to do with our little guy that is awaiting his debut in this world! This week were were focused on our precious 19-month-old Brandt who had to spend 2 nights at Children's Hospital for Bronchialitis.

We started on Wednesday when he had been up all night the night before with horrible coughing, so I called the pediatrician the next morning to make an appointment. I honestly thought we were just going in to see if there was something he could take to help him sleep. When we got there at 3pm, they were way more concerned with his "labored" breathing than his cough, as he was making a grunting noise with every breath. I had heard it that day but really thought it was because he wasn't feeling well and he was making a groaning sound to express that. They watched his tummy and his ribs, and said that he was working too hard to breathe and they didn't like that. His oxygen levels in his blood were good though, so it wasn't an immediate scare, but they didn't understand why he was working so hard. One lung was bringing in more air than the other, but overall they sounded clear. They sent us next door to get a chest x-ray, and verified it wasn't pneumonia. We did 2 rounds on a nebulizer, and then he took a steroid. Nothing was helping - he was still laboring to breathe. After about 3 hours at the pediatrician, they finally decided they wanted him to go to the ER so that he could be watched, as they said the problem is they can only keep up that kind of labored breathing for so long before their body doesn't have the energy to do it anymore. When I asked what happens at that point, they said he would turn grey and his oxygen levels would drop. That scared me plenty! Off we went to Children's....our 3rd time to go in 3 months. Keep in mind I had never been there before 3 months ago.....just had a rough go recently with the kiddos.

Children's also didn't like his labored breathing, but said the same things as the pediatrician in that everything else looked good (oxygen levels in blood, clear sounding lungs), so they were perplexed. They started to scare us a bit more as they said that sometimes other things, non-respiratory, can cause this kind of breathing, such as Diabetes. What???? So they did blood and urine tests on him (which was awful), and it came back that his glucose levels in his urine were about 210 when they like to see it around 100. They said the steroid that he took at the pediatrician could have caused that, but they wanted to do further verification. They sent the lab results off to endocrinology, and took more blood to do an even deeper test that would tell us how long the glucose had been high. They still thought that it wasn't Diabetes, but wanted to rule it out.

By this time it was getting late, and the doctor said that he was just not comfortable with letting us go home, as he's seen cases before where breathing like this can take a turn for the worse or turn into something else. He gave an example of one kid that it turned out to be appendicitis and his labored breathing was caused by his pain. So Jason stayed with Brandt in the ER and I took Kenzie home, who had happily been watching free Disney movies in the room. We got home and in bed about midnight.

I called Jason first thing in the AM to see how it was going, fully expecting him to say they were about to get discharged. Not so lucky. Brandt's oxygen levels had dropped down to 85% during the night (they had been at around 94%), so they admitted him and put him on oxygen. They were now in a room upstairs at the hospital and they wanted to watch him that day as well. They still didn't know what it was, and he was still breathing harder than he should. As soon as our nanny arrived, I raced over and took care of Brandt throughout the day. The NP that was looking after him came in to talk to me late morning and said that they think it is Bronchiolitis, which is the child's form of Bronchitis. The difference is that Bronchitis affects the large airways in your lungs, and the latter affects the smaller "branches" of your airways. It is a common result from certain viruses such as RSV, Parainfluenza (not the regular flu) and others. Brandt had been sick with some sort of cold/virus the week before, so that is probably where it came from. So his lungs were inflamed and having trouble breathing. The reason they came to that was that asthma or croup would have been cleared up by the nebulizer or the steroid, and the chest x-ray ruled out pneumonia, so because none of the treatments had worked, they suspected that was it. I read up on Bronchiolitis and it is common in under 2-year-olds but can be very severe and often times causes hospitalization.

The NP wanted to keep him throughout the day and wean him off of the oxygen to see how he did. By early afternoon, they took him off of it all together, and he seemed to be doing fine. That was great news! That evening we tried to convince them to let us go home, as Brandt had only gotten 2 hours of sleep the night before there, and a 45-minute nap that day, so we thought he'd sleep a lot better at home. The nurse tried to convince the medical team attending to him, but they wanted to watch him one more night, as it is typically at night while they are sleeping that oxygen levels drop. So I left my poor baby and husband one more night to go home, as there was only one bed in the room and sweet Jason insisted his 37-week-pregnant wife sleep at home. Brandt slept better that night, although I wouldn't call it "well", and I arrived early in the morning to let Jason go to an all-day partner retreat he had for work. He was exhausted after 2 nights of little sleep! Finally around 9am they said we'd be getting discharged soon, and we took off around 9:30am. Brandt held my hand and walked the entire way out of the hospital, which was a perfect pace for me as I don't walk quickly these days. :-)

I'm happy they took his condition seriously and were so concerned about him, but it sure was a stressful time, especially when they were still saying they didn't know what it was and they wanted to keep him. No parent likes to hear that. I'm relieved it was something that he could bounce back from relatively easily and not something more serious. He's back at home now and acting like his normal crazy self. I'm doing some bouncing back myself, as I think I was running on adrenaline for those 2 days just taking care of my baby. Now that I'm home, my body, that has just been exhausted normally lately, is saying "ok, time to take it easy again." I'm just so tired. 19 days to go until our little little guy arrives, so we're getting close!