Really That Complicated?

Well it appears after all of our efforts, dismantled as they were, to achieve getting this gram stain done, it is looking more like we will be foregoing this after all. First of all, when we called the pediatrician back to explain how the order had not processed through, we were then told that it had to be a clean catch for the culture. Neither the pediatrician nor the lab had the correct supplies for this. We were told we had to go to the Pulmonologist. So here we go again, calling the pulmonary office and explain the whole follies episode. The nurse practitioner tells me that she will have to speak with the doctor and will call us back. She told us we may have to bring him to the emergency room to get this done because they just did not have any availability. Several points here are first off, it takes 30 seconds to extract the specimen. Secondly, it is Urgent, but not Emergent, so a 6 hour ER visit seems a bit overkill. This is also not the first time we have been told to go to the ER by a doctor because they can not see Elias. Just a thought, but maybe that is a large contributing factor to why ERs around the country are so over crowed and slow. Doctors are sending patients there for things that are not emergencies. If it were such an emergency they would have told us to go there to begin with 3 days ago. Finally, it seems as though this was inconvenient to them and they were trying to come up with another solution. And they did, 7 hours later, that is when they called me back FINALLY! I was then told to simply monitor him again overnight and see if things improve, call back in the morning and we would go from there, in other words we will go through this whole process again. Fortunately, the odor has dissipated and not evident much this morning, that is a huge positive. The Atrovent seems to be helping somewhat during the day, does not seem to be helping him at night as he was still restless from 2 am this morning and awakened by the need for suctioning about every 20-30 minutes. So Elias had a rocky night sleep for the 6th night in a row. He is so very tired and cranky and not able to get to sleep this morning. Every time I pull him out of the crib he just bucks around and rubs his eyes, so I put him back and he attempts to sleep, but just can not get himself comfortable enough. I am not sure why exactly the Atrovent is not being effective, but it is possible that the nurse is not administering it correctly. Who knows, and we are again waiting to hear back from the doctor on what they want to do.

As I have updated they called me back, seven minutes instead of seven hours woo hoo!! They have decided against the gram stain and just want us to go to the pediatrician and let him decide. :D He has already seen him during this whole process, so I suppose we are stuck with waiting it out and hoping it gets better for the poor little guy. He is just simply miserable and it kills us not to be able to console him in any way.