Emergency Room, Triplet Duty & Vet Visit

So a “normal” day’s blog post would start around 7:30 am. But today’s blog post is starting around 10:15pm last night. Emmie went down good last night, and was sleeping soundly. Around 10:15 though, we heard her start stirring. She was quietly moaning & groaning, but then she started coughing. That last a few minutes, and it started sounding worse. Jeff went into her room to pick her up, and she was having a really hard time breathing. She was very wheezy and gasping for breath and starting to cry. It’s hard to explain how she sounded, but it was scary.

We had some “leftover” Albuterol and a nebulizer from when she had RSV, so we did a breathing treatment. She hated it and was screaming the whole time though, saying, “I don’t like it!” She was still struggling to breathe once we finished (and Mommy was starting to slip into panic mode), so we got dressed and headed to the North side ER.

By the time we got there, she had calmed down a lot, and was almost completely back to normal. We checked in, and a nurse listened to her really quickly, and said she sounded OK, and reassured us we did the right thing by giving her the Albuterol breathing treatment. (She did not enjoy that bracelet they put on her leg.)

We decided to stay and wait to see a doctor, just to be on the safe side. It was pretty busy there, and we had to wait a long time, and it was pretty difficult. We didn’t end up seeing the doctor until about 1:30 am (after two more nurses and a respiratory therapist), but he said her lungs sounded great, and he wasn’t too worried about it. He said the breathing issues could have been the result of mostly any random thing (even just having some food stuck in her throat), but he also reassured us doing the breathing treatment had been a good thing.

He suggested we could do a chest x-ray, basically just to make us feel better, but that he didn’t think she needed one. Since it was already so late, and she was acting perfectly fine (if not a bit delirious), we opted to skip it. They also swabbed her nose to test for flu and RSV, but we’re actually still waiting to hear about those results. For now, we’re praying the difficulty breathing episode was a one-time thing, and we won’t have to deal with this again.

We got home around 3am, got her to sleep around 3:15am, and then Jeff and I started to go to sleep. But Pretzel was having one of his seizures, so we stayed up with him a little longer. (This happens every few months, and we just have to hold him through it, for about an hour.) So it was 4am before Jeff and I finally go to sleep.

Needless to say, we all got a late start this morning, and slept until about 8:15am. Jeff went into work for a couple of hours, but I stayed home with Emerson. She actually woke up with a fever of about 102, so we gave her some Tylenol. She was acting fine and normal all day though, so maybe the fever was a weird fluke or something. We snuggled for a few minutes, then did a video chat with Grammy and Papa while waiting for the biscuits to bake. (We didn’t tell any of the family what was happening last night, so that everyone wouldn’t be freaking out, staying up late worrying all night. So we didn’t tell them until this morning when we woke up, and Papa needed to have a chat with his girl.) Also, I love this girl’s crazy morning hair!

 

When we woke up, we also noticed something was wrong with Pretzel’s mouth/snout, but he ate breakfast, and didn’t seem to upset, so we just watched it for the morning… You can kind of see it on the right side on his face below.

We spent about 10-15 minutes laying in Mommy’s bed, just singing songs together (Jesus Loves Me, Itsy Bitsy Spider, Twinkle Twinkle, etc…) and then I started running out of songs, so I asked what songs she sang at school. She said, “ABC’s!” so I started singing that, and I was shocked & impressed by how much of the song she knew!

We also played for a long time in her room this morning, doing all the things. She played her little piano, then put every single one of her toys in her crib, one at a time, and then moved all of her books from the table, over next to me, then wanted to hold them in a giant stack in her lap.

 

She picked up this phone and said, “Hi, Ganmommy!” (aka Grandmommie.) So then we used Mommy’s real phone to call Grandmommy, and she was so glad we surprised her with our call!

She told me she wanted to get dressed, and that she wanted a hair band. I showed her two options, and she said, “hair cip!”

She had chicken nuggets and apple sauce for lunch, and then Daddy came home from work right as we were finishing up.

Then Daddy stayed home with Emerson, and after eating ice in the back yard, and having more of her lunch she didn’t finish, he eventually got her down for a nice, two-hour nap.

And I went on my way to meet the #WalkerPartyof5 for triplet aunt duty! They had a couple of check-up & flu shot appointments to go to today, and needed an extra set of hands, so I went with them. Due to all the construction on the top floor of the parking desk at TMH, we decided it would be best to meet & take only one car, so Megan had to squish in the back of her SUV like a stowaway!

As we were driving to the hospital, Megan was like, “I almost told you to wear your hair up, because the triplet life is a sweaty life, but I figured you could just throw it up if you wanted to.” I thought her comment was funny, but I also thought it was funny she was gonna tell me what to do with my hair. (For the record, my hair was already up in a bun.) Anyways, everywhere we went today was like a billion degrees, and we were all constantly sweating, and we kept repeating, “the triplet life is a sweaty life!” (FYI – Kensley is wearing pink, Riley is wearing blue, and Ellie is wearing yellow.)

Their high-risk specialist, Dr. Dobak.

And Megan’s super awesome obstetrician, Dr. Thompson.

After all the appointments, I went back home just as Emerson was waking up. Pretzel’s mouth was still swollen, so Jeff called the vet, and they wanted to see him. So we ran over to the other side of town, to take him to the vet. Turns out he has an abscess on his tooth, and so now he’s on antibiotics for the next 10 days, and they will put him to sleep next Thursday and pull the tooth. Poor boy. He’s already had lots of teeth pulled (he had terrible teeth already when we adopted him a few years ago), and now he’ll have one more pulled… Emmie was a very good, sweet helper though while were there.

They even gave her a lollipop for being so sweet! (Although trying to get her to lick it, and not bite it, was difficult, and so I ended up having to take it from her so that wasn’t fun either.)

After the pure CHAOS of the past less-than-24-hours, I couldn’t even begin to fathom trying to come home and cook dinner. So instead, we put in an order for pizza (with the coupon for a free crazy bread), and picked up pizza for an early dinner.

 

Emmie did some Play-Doh after eating dinner, since it was raining and we couldn’t go outside, which is of course what she wanted to do – go outside & eat ice.

Since we had such an early dinner, we had about an hour or more to play and hang out after dinner. Jeff and Emmie called and talked to Ryan & Gabe on a video chat, and I worked on writing most of this blog while they chatted.

We tried to start putting her to bed a little earlier than we usually start the routine, in hopes that we could get her to sleep early. We found and read another cute new book today, that we had already but forgot about, and it was precious.

“Love doesn’t come in a bottle or jar. It’s right there inside you wherever you are.”

Thankfully, it worked, and I laid her down and was out of her room by 7:45, which is about 30-45 minutes earlier than we’ve been getting her down recently.

And now, after we’re obviously just emotionally and physically exhausted, we’re going to attempt to relax a little bit first, and then go to bed early ourselves. Praying hard that Emmie has no issues tonight, and that she sleeps through the whole night!