It has been a challenging week. Holden started to show signs of getting sick on Sunday. By early Monday morning, he had a fever of 102.5 and just wanted to be held. I called his pediatrician's office and they told me to bring him in. His pediatrician was on vacation, so we saw another doctor who has never met Holden and is not familiar with his history. This is where things got a little crazy. Although his lungs sounded clear, she sent us for a chest x-ray. Fast forward a couple hours, Monkey is feeling puny, is tired, still has a fever and is getting cranky. The doctor walks back in and tells us that he has bi-lateral pneumonia. I honestly didn't even freak out, because I couldn't believe it. While he was definitely sick, I've seen him with pneumonia and this was different. There was some talk about sending him to the hospital, but I quickly asked the doctor to consult with his pulmonologist - who has been treating Holden since he was born and knows Holden extremely well.
His pulmonologist agreed that is did not sound like pneumonia and asked me to bring him in the morning to Scottish Rite for blood work and to be tested for the flu(s)- and then to see her. Dr. Brooks ruled out pneumonia pretty quickly. The blood work showed that Holden's white blood cell count was high and he likely had a virus. But he had to wait over 24 hours to find out that he did NOT have a flu. Great News!! And the best news was from his chest x-ray. We compared the most recent with the last one (from 12/08) and you can see how much his lungs have healed and improved (thank you, God). This explains why we've been able to increase his time off of the O2. Most days he is now off 8-10 hours!
So it looks like he has a virus/cold. Other than the normal symptoms you'd expect, he's handling it great. I've turned his oxygen up slightly, just to give him some additional support. And we're letting him go without oxygen for 3o minutes here and there, but basically keeping it on him as much as we can, until he gets over this. He has not been sleeping well the past couple of nights so we are both walking around tired and cranky! But I'm thrilled that this cold is not affecting him the way it did last year.
Even a cold can't hold little Monkey back from his new found freedom - running!! He's a fast little guy. He reminds me of the baby in the Huggie's commercial. Mommy needs her running shoes!!
