Thanksgiving 911

I posted to the blog in the morning but the rest of the day didn’t go so smooth...

Amy went to feed Brandon up in Salt Lake. She had taken care of a lot of the Thanksgiving Day preparation but I was left to finish up. Amy left a glass pan full of the stuffing sitting on the stove waiting to be cooked in the oven. I turned on the stove to boil water for the potatoes but I accidentally turned on the wrong burner. I don’t know if you know this or not but, when heated on a burner, those things explode. This was quite a pain to clean up but that still wasn’t the most eventful part of the day.

Just as we were getting ready to eat Thanksgiving dinner, Amy came down the stairs and noticed that the water used to humidify Katelyn’s oxygen had been turned over. Amy turned it back but didn’t think much of it. The problem is that she carried Katelyn from upstairs to downstairs. We put Katelyn in her swing and began to get ready to eat. Gravity took over the water that was sitting in the tube began to drown her. Luckily Amy was paying attention and noticed her gasping for air and flailing around. By the time we ripped off her cannula she a lot of water had gone down her nose. I instantly turned her upside down and tried to get the water to come out. After a couple of seconds it was apparent that she wasn’t breathing. Amy went to call 911 while I kept trying to get the water out.

She kept getting worse and she began to turn very blue. It was VERY, VERY scary. I knew they couldn’t get there in time. After somewhere between 30 seconds to a minute she began to regain color and seem to begin breathing again. Luckily she never passed out and I didn’t have to actually start breathing for her. Once she seemed to have cleared most of the water, we grabed a new, dry cannula and cranked up her oxygen. By the time the paramedics arrived she was doing pretty well. They stayed and monitored her for a while and everything seemed good. They didn't take her away, but they suggested we call her doctor and get her checked out. We made several calls and everyone just said to watch her closely.

After dinner she seemed to have developed a pig-like grunt when she breathed. She also seemed to have trouble nursing. We were on our way up to Salt Lake so we quickly packed everything up and took her directly to Primary Children’s emergency room. When we got to the emergency room she was really squeaking when she breathed. She needed her oxygen turned up and her chest X-ray was a little fuzzy. It was hard for them to know if the X-ray was a problem. Because she has lung problems they didn’t have any idea what normal was for her. The decided it would be best to admit her overnight.

Amy spent the night with her. She ran back and forth all night between feeding Brandon and Katelyn. By morning she was doing so well that they had taken her completely off of oxygen for 10 hours and she was doing fine. They released her by the afternoon.. However, our pediatrician was fearful of taking her off of the oxygen at home, because her oxygen needs could still fluctuate quite a bit. Her grunting remained for a couple of days.

One funny note is that when Katelyn was being admitted, the doctor stopped Amy as she explained Katelyn’s situation and asked her what her medical background was. The nurse explained that she was just a NICU mom. We know just enough to be dangerous.