Just Breathe

Oh, life. You cruel tease. Just a day after I blog about how this October will be better, you send us back to the hospital almost a week to the day of our last hospital stay.

Not with seizures this time, because those? Whatever, we handle seizures these days. Instead, a case of bronchitis that came on so quickly that we had no idea he was even sick, let alone THAT sick. The magic word to get squeezed into an overbooked doctor is wheezing, by the way.

Two breathing treatments later and his pulse ox was still low, so he sent us to the hospital. And I started crying, embarrassingly enough, because I kept thinking of last year. I apologized for crying, all the tears I couldn't and didn't cry when he had his seizures last year. His doctor is so sweet and handed me Kleenexes and took me to a quiet room where I could use the phone, because of course, my iPhone is out for repair at the worst time ever.

Then off we went to the hospital. I was at a light next to a van that said Emergency Home Repair on the side and all I could think was, but is there an emergency heart repair? as I listened to the ragged breathing of Tommy and fought back a tide of tears.

A night of every 2-3 hour breathing treatments, plus steroids, and he's running around the hospital room like he's hardly sick. Last night, we had the same nurse we had the night we were in here for his seizures. He remembered us and at midnight, brought Tommy a little stuffed puppy dog.

I don't want to be here, but I didn't want to be at home with a boy whose breathing was so loud that he sounded like a truck idling, with a pulse ox lower than it should be. When they brought in seizure pads for his crib last night my heart skipped uncomfortably and I promised that it was okay, that he doesn't have seizures in his sleep. But how I still hate that in the midst of normal, medical problems we still have the seizure shadow following us around.

He's breathing better this morning. Running around like a maniac, hiding from the nurses, dancing and yelling about the school buses he sees outside the window in a voice that sounds like a baby Barry White. His heart rate is elevated from the steroids and me? My heart is a little fragile this morning, but as always, we'll be fine.

I just hope that he doesn't decide to make this whole fall hospital stay an annual thing.