First E.R. Visit

Wild as Kate is, Matt and I assumed Kate's first visit to the Emergency Room would be for stitches. Not so, as we experienced our first panicked hospital trip today. Not the kind where you throw the child in the car and speed there yourself, but the kind where you get a call that your child is being sent in an ambulance and you're 50 miles away!

Let me start at the beginning...

Today was Kate's last day at her current day care, as today was closing day for our house and then we move on Friday (yay!!) so I had my camera with me to capture a few shots of her with her first school friends.

 She arrived in style, in her newly-turned-around car seat, and joined her class of rowdy two-year olds

and Matt and I went on to Nashville, where I worked a half day before Matt picked me up at noon. We grabbed lunch at Wendy's, and just as we were gathering our garbage to head off to the closing, the phone rang.

It was the director of the day care, saying Kate was having a lot of trouble breathing. She'd woken up from her nap with a croupy cough and couldn't catch her breath, was grabbing at her throat, etc. At first it seemed they thought Matt should just come pick her up and go to the pediatrician (they know he's usually local, while I work far away) but upon realizing he was in Nashville too, they said they needed to call an ambulance. Panicked, we told our realtor, etc., that we wouldn't be able to close today, and headed back to Clarksville as quickly as we could.

The director called us again on our way to say Kate was sitting up in the ambulance, getting a breathing treatment, and she was doing fine. So, we unclenched a bit and didn't worry quite as much the rest of the way. When we arrived, Kate was sitting there in the hospital bed, in her own clothes (that comforted me, since I wondered if she'd be in a hospital gown), being calm and sweet. The day care director and assistant were there with her, and she had her naptime blanket and a stuffed puppy they'd grabbed for her to hold. She wanted the pulse-reader-thing that was taped to her finger off, but otherwise, was very calm.

We joked that she had to make a grand exit on her last day, and the teachers actually said an ambulance had been there just hours before for a show-and-tell sort of thing--Kate must have decided she wanted to ride in that thing! That, or she just really doesn't want us to move to a new house!

The diagnosis was croup, which she's had before. We've done the take-her-out-into-the-cold-night-air thing and she gets better, but this was apparently much worse than those incidents. She also has a somewhat chronic cough (though it's actually seemed better lately), so we've wondered about athsma, but they didn't seem to think that was the problem. All we know is we're not letting doctors write it off as "the beginnings of a sinus infection" anymore! They gave Kate a chest x-ray (she did great!), another breathing treatment (she flipped out!), and a steroid to help open her airways. The steroid would have been painless if she'd been willing to drink it in apple juice, but she refused, so she had to get two shots. She's a trooper, though.

She even felt good enough to "help" with the packing this evening, and is sleeping soundly with a brand new humidifier!