I kind of feel like the kid on “david after dentist” when he was all tripped out on laughing gas. Except exactly opposite. We spent another day at the hospital again. Abby’s issues aren’t anywhere as serious as a lot of kids with Down syndrome, but I’m worried that this might just be par for the course for the rest of her life. She gets sick, she gets an ambulance ride-whether necessary or not. I posted the following to my family’s private website (where we can swear and point fingers and post pictures that are too sleazy to post to facebook or blogs)…and thought I’d post it here because this blog is also sort of my journal. I want to remember all of this, but I suck at remembering anything.

We spent the day in the ER again. Abby had an xray done on Wednesday that showed bronchialitus (is that the same thing as bronchitus?) and “the beginning” of pneumonia, but not “true pneumonia” whatever that means. She also seemed to have a sinus infection so her pediatrician (who is a nurse practitioner that we absolutely LOVE, but I’m wondering now if Abby’s care is a little bit above her head…I’m not sure what to do about that) put her on a stronger antibiotic than she had been on after getting pneumonia last month.   As of this morning she hadn’t shown any real signs of improvement, but at the same time didn’t seem to be doing too terribly so I went to church- Lance was speaking in sacrament- and after I took her and Casey (because he escaped from Primary and no one had noticed…new Primary Presidency day) to the urgent care to see about getting her some steroids to help things along. We get there and the nurse listens to her and freaks out then the doctor listened to her and called an ambulance. I really don’t think it was all that bad, I just think they’re not used to listening to Abby’s crap for lungs. They couldn’t get the wheeze to go away and she threw up all of the oral steroids they had tried to give her so they put me holding her on a gurney and sent us up to the bigger hospital in Bremerton. They said they’d probably need to put her on IV steriods, which freaked me out because of how hard it was to find a vein last time, so I made Lance (who I was lucky enough to get a hold of at church and met us at the urgent care right before they took us) come up to the hospital after dropping Casey off.   We arrived there and for those of you who’ve worked in hospitals you know that a baby arriving by ambulance is sort of a big deal. There was a room waiting for us with two doctors, two nurses and an administrator.   It was pretty clear in about five minutes that things weren’t as serious as they had thought and half of the people left. So we got her xray done which showed that the pneumonia had cleared up but her lungs were still inflamed. So they were able to give her the steroids by injection instead of IV. Hoorah. Then they sent us home.

Edited to Add: The nurses LOVED Abby. One even brought her a stuffed animal for sick kids (it was all packaged up…not like I was imagining when the nurse said she wanted to do it…a big fuzzy ball of germs), and everyone cooed over her pigtails. She smiled and performed. Everyone loves Abby. It’s just that simple.

A fantastic way to burn through a couple grand of our insurance’s money (I’m not sure how much we’ll have to pay but I’m super grateful that we have good insurance) when really they probably could have given her the injection at the urgent care. Fantastic. Because Abby won’t hold down the steroids (they tried four more times at the ER to do the oral kind) we have to go tomorrow for another injection and then we’ll go from there. I’m not sure.

That’s my story. Kind of without point, but news none the less.