A Trip to the Doctor

...for Megan. There's nothing unusual about my kids getting sick so why write a post about it? Well this trip caught me off guard so I figured I'd tell you about it. It started about a week, maybe a week and a half ago, with Megan having a little bit of a cough. No big deal, I had her use her inhaler. That's what I'm supposed to do, she coughs, I give her her inhaler. If the cough doesn't go away then I take her in to see the doctor. So she gets up today and her cough is no better and even a little worse despite her using her inhaler 3 times a day for the past week. So I go to the next step, call and get her a doctors appointment.

Well I got lucky with that since her doctor was only in the office for that morning and was only seeing patients that were really sick. The office staff know me there (been going to the same pediatrician since Lauren was born) and know that I don't call unless it's important so the receptionist doesn't even hesitate and puts Megan on the schedule that morning. (Two weeks ago the doctor even came in on her day off just to see Zach since once again she heard who was calling. Sure enough he had tonsillitis. But that's a whole other story.)

So we go in and sit in the waiting room. There's one other little girl there with her mom and that little girl was just coughing up a storm. She sounded so bad I thought she was going to cough a lung up! I look at Megan who hasn't coughed once since we got there and at this point I think I'm a little crazy for bringing her in. All along Megan has said she felt fine so why was I sitting there? I guess you can call it mother's intuition or something. I just knew she wasn't quite right. So now I'm going to fast forward to the diagnosis...pneumonia! Megan has pneumonia. No way was I expecting that. At the worst I was thinking bronchitis and even mild bronchitis at that. But pneumonia??? Geez! I'm soooo glad I took her in.

Paul thinks I'm paranoid every time she coughs. He's right. My paranoia started about 4 years ago when Megan was coughing and by the time I got her to the doctor she could hardly walk, she just didn't have the energy. (She started coughing on a Monday night and her doctors appointment was Tuesday afternoon so she went downhill rather quickly.) Her pulse/ox was 88 which is extremely low, like, emergency room low. I realized how serious her condition was when they told me that if they didn't get her pulse/ox up then they were going to take her by ambulance to the hospital. When her pulse/ox reached 92 I was happy but they said, nope, still emergency room material. They finally let us leave when it hit 97, after being there for 3 1/2 hours. So yeah, you can say I'm a little paranoid every time she gets a cough.

The diagnosis today still floored me though. (Her pulse/ox was 98 today.) I thought I was keeping on top of everything but I guess I should have taken her to the doctor at the beginning of the week instead. She talked and acted fine all week, including today, and never once had a fever. Honestly, if you saw her right now you'd think I was making this all up. She so does NOT look sick. But apparently she is and is now on an antibiotic plus prednisolone and we're past inhalers and now doing nebulizer treatments. I'm sooo glad I didn't wait until Monday to take her to the doctor.