I’m tired and I should be sleeping. So should Abby. We’re both wide awake as “Finding Nemo” plays for the fourth time in the background. Abby’s spent the day being handled to roughly by too many people, and now she’s even pushing me away. It’s okay.

I need some space, too. The best way I’ve found for me to process things is to put fingers to the keyboard and just write. This post won’t be edited. I won’t read it two, three, or seventeen times like I do my other posts. It just is.

Abby awoke this morning full on screaming. We could not calm her. A new symptom in our list of crap that’s been going wrong. We had spent the day before in our pediatrician’s office, then to the ER. Steroids, albuterol, steroids, suction. Home. She had slept well at home, for which Lance and I were truly grateful. We had been low on sleep. Abby’s sleep study had been on Monday, then Lance spent the night caring for her on Tuesday.

We bathed her, gave her a couple of treatments with her nebulizer, then threw her in the car to see her pediatrician again. We debated back and forth whether or not to just take her straight to the hospital, but after the ROTTEN day I had in the ER yesterday, we hoped that we could find a way to calm her and get her breathing right in the doctors office.

It was not to be had. They gave her two types of asthma medicine twice, and it didn’t help. As we were there, no matter what they threw at her she continued to go downhill. The doctor called the ambulance. This was her sixth ride in her 2 and a half years here.

The moved us to an ER room and realized that the problem was too big for the tiny space and moved her to trauma. There she would have her own set of nurses. Constant eyes upon her. As we walked in, the floor still had blood splatters from the person in there before us. The reality of how serious things had gotten started to sink in. For the next four hours, Abby screamed. Lance, all 6’4″ linebacker build of a man could not keep her from wriggling out of his grasp. She was on continuous albuterol, along with oxygen, and refused to keep the mask on her face. She needed IV fluids, magnesium and steroids, among others I’m sure I’m forgetting.  After those four hours, they finally got her stable enough to move to Intensive Care, where we are now.

They gave us a large, comfy bed, which is where I’m sitting right now. It’s almost 11:30 and Abby is still wide awake. The meds make her jittery, and she doesn’t seem anywhere near sleep. She did almost fall asleep for a second, but when she did, her oxygen saturation level dropped dramatically, so they had to up her o2. When they did that, the amount of air they were pumping in woke her up. The cycle repeated itself and she soon gave up on trying to rest.

We had to put her arms in soft little cast things that make it so she can’t bend her arms and pull of the cannula. After some thinking, she pulled her feet up and tried to rip it out that way. She’s nothing if not tenacious and clever.

The baby in the room next to us is crying and I want to go hug her mom. She looks even more tired than I do. But mostly I want to sleep.

Thank you for your messages, your texts, calls and prayers. Thank you to my neighbors who took my boys on a moments notice. We feel so loved. Keep praying for Abby. She’s doing much better now, and we hope this continues.

Thanks, nerds.