Pages

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Landon's trip to the hospital

Thanks all for your prayers for Landon! Also, sorry I didn't get the word out better, my cell phone died and I didn't have a charger! Thursday morning Landon was sleeping as his gtube feed was going in and coughed then started gagging a bit and threw up mucus. It still seemed like he was still gaggy so we got him out and patted him on his side for him to get the rest of it out and suddenly he stopped breathing. His eyes kinda went in the back of his head and it looked like he was sleeping but chest wasn't rising. We patted his back trying to stimulate him to breathe (he needed this last time he was having trouble) and he'd gasp for a breath every once in awhile. Brought him out to the family room, gave him a couple puffs of Albuterol inhaler, opened his airway, kept patting and hooked up the oxygen monitor since he was starting to turn colors and he was sating 64%. Nich cranked up his o2 from 1/4 liters to 2 liters and he was still sating low 90s. It took about 5 minutes but he started breathing consistently again. I went up to take a shower in case we needed to take him in and just when I got in Nich called up that he did it again and was going to call the ambulance. Of course by the time they got to our house he started opening his eyes and was sating better, but this had went on for about 20 minutes. They listened to him and said he was moving air well but advised us to follow up with our pedi. He was busy, so we went to the ER. There Landon was sating well so they just observed and just after we talked about getting ready to go he dropped out of the blue to 59%. ER doc decided to do a chest and abdominal xray and came back that he had severe bilateral pneumonia (he had a small pocket of pneumonia diagnosed 2/23 but we thought he was getting a lot better). They quickly decided to transfer us to UM since they couldn't handle him. So, after 5 hours in their ER, we went for an ambulance ride to UM and sat in their ER for 6 hours. Long story short....Landon has baseline bad lungs. No new pneumonia, just that hospital didn't have an idea of what Landon's BPD lungs look like. Here's a picture to compare...big picture is BPD lungs, not Landon's just from Google Image Search :) Top left is healthy baby lungs, bottom left is bilateral pneumonia lungs. That was an easy mistake to make. Good news - no pneumonia! Bad news - he has really sick lungs all the time. We didn't realize how fortunate he/we've been to stay out of the hospital so much! Kids with BPD generally have a lot of respiratory issues that require hospitalization, no wonder when you see how sick their lungs are! So what happened?? We think he may have somehow aspirated some of his tube feeding (a bit got into his lungs probably when coughed/threw up), which probably sent him a bit into a respiratory distress bout. So thankful it wasn't anything worse! He's at home, on 1/4 liter o2 and doing great!

1 comments:

Britt said...

Glad he's home now. Sorry I couldn't help you out but I really can drive one of you home anytime! I was up til 2 both nights you called for a ride, so never feel like you would be keeping me up late! You know if I am not working, I'll do anything for you guys!

Also I looked at those pictures up close and I have no idea what they mean.