It turns out that croup is secondary. Julianna has pneumonia. But they tell us that this is a matter for concern, but nothing to lose sleep over.
Julianna is a medication hog. They have upped the Versed twice, added a regular infusion of Fentanyl, and topped it of with a drug I can barely spell, let alone pronounce. While this would knock out the average child for hours, the effect on Julianna is somewhat more prosaic. It makes her sleepy enough that IF you don’t talk, and you turn off all the lights, and you don’t touch her or mess with any of the twenty-six lines coming out of her (that’s an exaggeration BTW), she’ll lie still, most of the time.
Nonetheless, this morning she managed to wiggle her arms out of their arm restraints, and it takes a fair amount of convincing to get her to close her eyes. She wants to stare through little slits and keep an eye on everything. She takes one flexible leg and stretches it straight up in the air so the little red pulsox light glows like a radio tower, while the other foot pushes lazily against the crib rail. And a minute ago she made a valiant effort to extubate herself, using only the blunt surface of the arm brace! We’re playing Enya to try to keep her calm.
It looks like we’ll be in the hospital for several more days. This is a pain in the rear, but OTOH, I have to admit that I get a lot of writing done when I sit in the PICU. (Which, for the blessedly uninitiated, is pronounced pick-you, not P-I-C-U) Maybe my mother’s day gift will be to have all my kids at home at bedtime.
But it’s time to shift focus. So I close out this post and prepare to talk about something different. After I do an online submission. Between holding down my daughter so she doesn’t thrash out of her tubing and nursing Nicholas. Stay tuned.
Kathleen M. Basi 