Always another bridge to cross.

We had to have Little Quinn admitted to Children's Hospital in Buffalo this morning due to a respiratory infection that became obvious late yesterday afternoon. He was working hard to breathe, and even frequent doses of albuterol were not providing anything more than temporary relief. As of this writing, it is likely that he will be intubated in the next hour or so.

Further posting as events warrant.

UPDATE: Little Quinn is still in the hospital, and will most likely be there for a week or so, depending on how things turn out. He does not have pneumonia; the current diagnosis is bronchitis, either due to an infection in his lower airways or due to a reaction against something he inhaled. If the latter, he should begin to show improvement fairly quickly; if the former, he will actually get worse before he gets better as he fights off the infection.

However, the doctors are confident that we caught the issue early on, so Little Quinn has been on antibiotics for some hours now, in addition to receiving medicines to make him sleep and restrict his motions so he doesn't pull the tubes out. Throughout the ordeal, Little Quinn's blood gas levels have been normal, and his chest X-rays showed no evidence of pneumonia. We are now awaiting cultures generated from his secretions, which apparently take three days or so to process. So that's a bit of a waiting game there.

It all began last night with a fever and difficult breathing. We gave him acetaminophen and brought the fever back down to normal fairly quickly (he hasn't run a temperature since late last night), but the labored breathing continued. The final straw was at about 6:00 this morning, when his breathing became so labored that he went beyond wheezing and started chirping with each indrawn breath. Not good.

We came home from the hospital a bit ago to eat dinner, and will be going back after the docs do nightly rounds. Before we left, Little Quinn's breathing was looking very normal and his swelling had gone down to the point where the nurses and respiratory technicians had to re-do some of his tubes and connections to accomodate the lesser bulk.

It's hard, as always, to see Little Quinn on his respirator again, bringing back as it does some memories that I'm generally loath to recall. But what's different this time is the degree of certainty the docs are willing to express. The six-week ordeal of Little Quinn's birth was one round of "Let's do this and see what happens, and then we'll decide what to do next" after another, while this time is more of a binary state: "Either this is happening or that is happening. If it's this, we'll do X, and if it's that, we'll do Y." And this is all stuff that the docs have seen many times with children of all ages. That's about as encouraging a note as is to be found in this whole scenario.

It's time again, I guess, for Little Quinn to be the Mighty Quinn again. Further updates will come as events warrant.

(Oh, and I almost forgot: in the "Adding insult to injury" department, the ER folks took Little Quinn's temperature rectally this morning [at home, we use the axillary method, under the armpit], which they then followed up with another dose of acetaminophen which they dispensed to him in suppository form. Then, this afternoon, he was given an IV line in his groin. Poor little guy!)

UPDATE II (Sunday, July 27): I posted a follow-up this morning, here.