Explanation for the title: under our insurance plan, a doctor's visit is a $15 co-pay and an Emergency Room visit is a $125 co-pay. Read on...
So, when I checked Greg's temp this morning, it was back to normal. I debated not taking him to the doctor, but decided to go ahead and take him, because he still seemed miserable in the Respiratory Department. He was coughing a lot and wheezing a lot.
Our pediatrician has drop-in hours from 7:30-9:00 am, and we arrived a little after 8am. The waiting room was full (I expected it after the weekend, especially a holiday weekend). Almost four hours, one nurse practitioner visit, two nebulizer treatments, one chest X-ray, and a tentative diagnosis (only tentative because they can't run the actual test in the office) of RSV/bronchiolitis later, we left the building. They gave me a nebulizer machine for Greg (well, they're actually billing our insurance for it) and prescriptions for liquid Albuterol (for the nebulizer) and a steroid. The chest X-ray was to rule out pneumonia. Thankfully, that came back negative.
Remember this post from when Susanna was a baby? Susanna had the same thing Greg has. Apparently, Greg had reached that critical point in his illness where he was really having trouble breathing. He actually slept fairly well last night (in three or four hour stretches), which was why I was so surprised that he seemed so bad off this morning. Had he begun showing signs of distress overnight (the way Susanna did when she had bronchiolitis), I would have had to take him to the ER (which I did with Susanna*). Wasn't that thoughtful of him to wait a few hours before having breathing difficulties? I'm SURE he did that intentionally (of course he didn't. It was purely by chance).
So, we have a fairly sick little boy on our hands, but he will be OK in a few days. For now, we're giving him breathing treatments every four hours and a steroid once a day. He goes back to the pediatrician on Wednesday, but hopefully things will be better by then.
I have another post brewing about hospice and palliative care (hey! did you know that November is National Hospice and Palliative Care month? Neither did I until today!), but that will take actual time and more thought than I can drum up right now. Hopefully that will show up tomorrow.
*In Susanna's/my defense, I had already taken her to an Urgent Care center once and called the pediatrician's answering service early that evening when she seemed to be getting worse. I think that if medical care in Danville had been better, the ER trip would have been unnecessary, because the bronchiolitis would have been caught earlier.
1 comment:
18 years ago my daughter, then 4, got chicken pox. A short while later my son, then 7 months, got chicken pox. She, not so bad, he - very bad...104 temp, constant conversations with pediatrician (they wouldn't see him with that contagion)...at one point the pediatrician said "if his fever gets much higher he'll have a seizure and then the fever will break." I kid you not, just like that. like I was supposed to just stand by and watch him. Thank goodness he did not have a seizure and was well by Christmas. One of these days I'll tell you about the time his viral infection turned into pneumonia...
I hope Gret is better soon and you all get some rest.
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