breathing easy

the past week, the poon family has been hit with a cold. one by one, we've all fallen into about a three and a half day misery of congestion, coughing, sneezing and headache. this is not unusual, of course. we have kids who hang out with other kids. germs are brought and shared with none of the fuss you see with sharing toys. normally, we endure with orange juice, tissues, and, recently, a vaporizer. so i am a veteran when it comes to dealing with the cold virus in my children, not to mention myself. well, the other day, i noticed that mali sounded a little different than the normal congestion rattle the rest of us got. she was acting fine, still playing and walking around, but she just sounded...off. i hesitated to use the word wheezing when describing it because a doctor explained to me the difference when she was a baby and, paranoid, i had taken her in for what turned out to be nothing. after the first day of this, i decided that i was not paranoid and i wanted her seen. it was a saturday, so rather than call our doctor (who isn't with the practice any more anyway, so i really don't know who they've assigned to us now), we took her to the urgent care clinic (not the ER...just in case i really am just being paranoid). well, lo and behold, a mother does have certain instincts. the child had pneumonia. so they sent us to the ER at St. Anthony's. so fai dropped noe and me (i, too, was sick with a headache and fever), and took mali in for some treatment. he called around 5 to say they had done some breathing treatments and a steroid, but that it didn't seem to be working for her, so they were sending her to cardinal glennon to be admitted for 24 to 48 hours. i felt so bad! here was my little baby so sick and i had waited a day to do anything about it and now she was going to have to stay in the hospital. and i wasn't even with her! so i called our friend cynthia and asked her to take noe overnight and give me a ride to the hospital (the other car's battery was dead) so that i could be with my baby. thanks, cynthia!

so here's the run down: mali has pneumonia and tested positive for RSV. she was put on isolation, so she couldn't even walk around the halls or go to the play area like the other kids. she was hooked up to a monitor and oxygen, so she couldn't really even walk around her room. she had to have an IV, which she managed to tear out twice. each time she had to have it replaced, i cried with her! the third time, i made fai go in with them while they did it and i stood out in the hallway with the animal cracker reward...and cried. she had to have lung percussions several times a day, which i am continuing at home. she's also on antibiotics, which she continues at home. her oxygen stats kept dropping into the mid-eighties, so they kept having to wake her up to try and bring it back up into the nineties. the first night, she didn't get more than a couple of hours of sleep total, and it was not all at once. the second day, she dipped down even when she was awake at times. the doctor, at this point, said that we should expect her to be in the hospital for a few days more and tit was probably going to be a few weeks before she was completely well again. she said they wouldn't let her go home until she was off the oxygen completely rather than just when she was sleeping, which didn't seem likely any time soon since they kept having to increase the amount of oxygen she was getting. last night, she finally went to sleep around 5, waking up only a few times for short periods, and then sleeping through the night. at some point, she managed to tear her oxygen out again, but her oxygen stats were holding steady in the nineties, so the nurse decided to leave it off. this morning, she started to get her appetite back and they unplugged her monitor for a little while to let her walk around. when they checked her again later, and even though she was a bit breathless from the exercise, her states were steady and good. so they decided to let her go this afternoon! the doctor was surprised to say that she was rebounding quickly and should do just fine at home. so we're back home, she's happy and sleeping, mommy's going to go to bed early tonight after a nice hot shower, then we're going to hole ourselves up in the house for a few days to recover.

i want to thank all of those who prayed for our daughter and offered their services and brought us dinners. it's so great to have such a wonderful support system around, especially when we don't have family close by to help out. thank you all and bless you.