Yesterday was a pretty fun day. Jessica, Namine, and I went over to my mom’s house for lunch. My dad went out and got a sled for Namine, and he ran around the front yard with a bundled Namine in tow. (I would have loved to do the towing, but I was stricken with a ginormous migraine.) My mom did most of the picture-taking; I will upload a bunch as soon as I get them from her. But now, it seems, that all fun has passed and we are paying for it, with interest.
Last night, around 1:30, Namine started coughing. It began as a mild, staccato cough, nothing major. But instead of passing and allowing Namine to sleep peacefully once again, it persisted and got worse. Soon she was coughing much too frequently, and it sounded like there was fluid in there. Sometimes Namine will get a little boogery drainage in her sleep, and I thought that perhaps this was the case. So I woke her up and took her into the living room to get a drink of water. As I handed her a small cup of water, she started coughing and hacking again, and threw up. It was almost entirely phlegm. After throwing up, though, she was willing to drink some water. I thought perhaps this was just what Namine needed; so I put her back to bed.
It was not long after I had put her back to bed (now about 2:15 or so) when Namine started coughing again. Not quite as bad as before, but coughing just the same. Since it was more than four hours past her last breathing treatment, I gave her another dose. That took about fifteen minutes, and then I put her back to bed. She fell asleep easily. After she was asleep, I checked her on the pulseox – O2 was a solid 89, heart rate was 96. Fine for being asleep, and I couldn’t ask for better oxygenation, especially with a cough.
I determined to stay up until she’d been asleep, cough-free, for an hour. I myself am a bit of a heavy sleeper, and I didn’t want to sleep through another coughing fit, especially if Namine needed to cough up more boogers. Namine coughed a couple more times before settling into a deeper sleep, and I finally went to bed some time around 4:30.
This morning, of course, Jessica and I were going to get Namine up at 7:00, in preparation for her ENT clinic appointment. Yeah, that didn’t happen. We both rolled out of bed barely in time to get ourselves ready, to say nothing of waking the tired child. Tired and more than a little crabby, once she was more or less awake. Not that I blame her.
Special needs came by the ENT clinic to listen to Namine’s lungs after the regular clinic appointment, but Namine’s lungs sound fine. She didn’t cough for them, either. It’s not that she was stubborn, and refused to cough; she just wasn’t coughing. Since RSV and other crazy respiratory diseases make the patient miserable, and Namine was cheerful as can be (like always), they don’t think she has anything. They took a culture anyway, just to cover all the bases, and sent Namine home.
Another bit of good news: Namine’s ear infection is now completely cleared up. So no more vaccuuming out her ear, and no more blowing antifungal powder in her ear, either. We’re still going to play it safe, though, and try to get some ear plugs before resuming pool therapy. It would seriously suck to repeat this whole ordeal.
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