The particular doctor we saw had never met Namine before, but she seemed well enough acquainted with her file. (It’s about a foot thick. No surprise there, with everything she’s been through.) She listened to Namine’s heart and lungs, hooked her up to a pulse ox (heart rate: 130-140, O2: 90-91), checked her ear tubes, and looked in her nose and mouth. Namine was, as always, well behaved and cooperative for the doctor.
The verdict was that Namine seems to be doing fine. Her lungs did not sound raspy or crackly, it’s just that she’s got a lot of phlegm. Of course we’ve seen this before; doctors declare Namine to be okay, we go home, she gets a massive infection, we go to the ER. In an effort to head things off a bit, we suggested perhaps putting Namine on antibiotics now. The doctor said that it may or may not be a bacterial infection, and because it might not be, antibiotics might not work – worse yet, might exacerbate the infection. (Remember the fungal ear infection? Yeah. Doctors had declared that to be bacterial, and the antibiotics killed the good bacteria trying to fight the fungus.) Well, we didn’t want that. So we agreed to wait another day, and if Namine was still stricken was excessive boogers (that’s the technical term), then we’d bring her in again.
Before I put Namine to bed, I took her temperature. She did have a bit of a fever, 99 degrees. So I gave her some Motrin (I think the brand was actually Advil, but we tend to call all the infant stuff “Motrin”) before bed.
Well, last night Namine was breathing a little bit heavy again, as she moved air around all those boogers. But it wasn’t respiratory distress, and she actually sounded better than she had the night before. I still put her on her Boppy pillow as soon as she was sound asleep, just to be on the safe side. At some point between then and 3:00 in the morning, she had wriggled herself off it again, but by that point, she was breathing clear again. Looks like she’s beating this one on her own.
Leave a Reply