Gracie's Hospital Visit.

Friday morning Gracie had a cough. Just a cough. She seemed peppy enough, but just in case, Steve asked her casually if she needed to stay home from preschool and rest. She said yes. Then we clarified that she would rest in bed, with no TV shows, and she changed her mind and went off to school.

She came home with a bigger cough. She was breathing a little funny, and she was pretty tired. We went over to the McClains' to grill hotdogs, and she spent most of the time on the couch. Then she took a three hour nap. When she woke, Steve started to get nervous. At the time I wasn't really sure why he was so nervous--it seemed like just a cold--but he was very unsettled, and she was a little sensitive, so we kept her in bed and let her eat dinner on a tray and watch Aladdin on my laptop.

Before the movie was over, Steve had called Paul over to consult. They took turns listening to her heart and lungs, and Steve passed his stethoscope to me to take a listen, too. Her heartbeat was fast. Like, faster than the new baby's super-fast heartbeat. And she had a definite wheeze in her breathing. When she paused in her movie watching to talk to us, she couldn't finish a sentence without taking a deep breath. Three words gasp three more. Steve called the pediatrician on call, and by 8ish they were on their way to to the emergency room at Brenner's Children's Hospital (literally a block away; love that).

I waited at home while Charlie slept. After about half an hour Steve called me and said they were putting Grace on a continuous nebulizer. She sat on his lap for an hour breathing through a mask (she was not a fan). Her heart rate stayed high, and her oxygen saturation was unstable.

It is making me exhausted just writing this. Poor kid.

Anyway sometime around 10 they started hinting to Steve that she might get admitted, and we decided I should go stay with her. I packed up her elephant (Ellie-Brons) and a quilt my mom had made her, and Amanda came to sleep on the couch (for Charlie) while I caught a ride with our sweet neighbor so Steve and I could pull a changing-of-the-guard at the hospital.

As I walked in to Gracie's exam room (19), Steve was holding an oxygen mask just in front of her nose. They had wanted her to do a  nasal cannula (the little tube that goes in your nostrils), but after an hour of constant nebulizer, she had had it with stuff on her face. We were just discussing options to keep her oxygenated (Steve: "You can't hold this thing for four hours.") when I handed her Ellie-Brons, and, kicking in to snuggle mode, she glanced at the mask in front of her nose/mouth and asked, "Can I suck my thumb?"

Hallelujah.

"If you put the cannula in you can," Steve told her. She thought it over for about 10 seconds, and then decided that was totally worth it. After a brief trip home to grab me a blanket and my iPad, Steve kissed us goodbye and went home to relieve Amanda of Charlie-duty.

Gracie and I laid in her hospital bed and watched some Shrek movie. There are too many of those. Every now and then she would pop up to look at her monitor. After a while she learned that numbers in the 90's were good, and anything lower was bad.

When the movie an hour later someone came down with a wheelchair to take our girlie up to her own room. We unhooked her cannula and plugged it in to an oxygen tank. Ellie-Brons got tucked in beside her, and you'd have thought Grace had just won the lottery--she loved the wheelchair. She chatted and chatted with her nurse, telling her all about her brother, Charlie ("Charlie James Walton. He has blond hair with a curl. He's two.") and anything else that came to her.

She was so excited when we got to her room that I wasn't sure she would ever go to sleep. :) After she'd been checked over by the nurses I set up my "bed" on a little couch near her and then snuggled into her hospital bed in the dark to sing and stroke her hair until her happy-jitters wore off a little. Then I kissed her, promised I would stay the whole night, and laid down to listen to her nighttime sounds.

Sometime around 1 am she finally nodded off.

Gracie's SAT monitor. When she saw this picture as I prepared to post, she said, "Oh, 92! That's a good number!"

I wasn't sure if I would sleep. Whenever her sat (oxygen saturation) dropped below 92, her monitor started pinging and the green lights turned yellow. I laid awake watching the lights and listening. Twice in the first hour it went off and nurses came in; both times I was already up checking her cannula or the wire connected to her toe (if she twisted it up, it would stop measuring her pulse and sat correctly).

I thought it was pretty cool, actually, how they monitored her levels. They taped this little red light to her toe, and it registered her pulse and the O2 in her blood. She started calling it her "sunshine toe," and it glowed red under her blanket all night long.

Sunshine toe.

Around 3am she woke up REALLY mad and swatting at her cannula, which was just bugging her. I got up and soothed her and untangled her cords until she settled down again.

A nurse came in about 20 minutes later to give her some more albuterol. "Lots of kids don't even wake up for this," she said, as she put the mask over Gracie's nose and mouth. Gracie immediately jerked awake and said, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!"

Have to love that girl's spunk. I climbed in bed with her and coached her breathing for two puffs' worth of medicine and then, worn out, she fell back asleep and we both finally got a good chunk of rest from 4am until about 6:45.

At which point Miss Gracie popped up in bed and said, "Mom? What movies can we watch??? What can we have for breakfast?!?"

She actually loved her hospital stay once morning had arrived. She didn't mind the cannula (she could suck her thumb around it, after all) or her Sunshine toe much (though she did ask a couple times when she could take them off). And she loved the vast supply of Disney movies (on VHS! Haha. She got so confused when I told her I had to "rewind" one of the videos!).

She got to order off of a room service menu for breakfast! Oh, she was in heaven--especially when they brought her order (scrambled eggs, Froot Loops, strawberries, and milk!) right to her in bed WHILE SHE WATCHED CINDERELLA! Add that to the frequent stream of admiring nurses checking her vitals (and occasionally gifting her a coloring book or sticker), and she pretty much thought she had it made. At one point a nurse came in to check something and Gracie said, nonchalantly, "You can check my heart if you want to."

The joys of room service:

She scarfed down her eggs and strawberries, but was a little disappointed when I made her take a movie break after the first two. :)

Around 10 she had visitors. Karen dropped by after a staff meeting to say hello and sneak the girl some candy, and just after she left Steve and Charlie arrived bearing strawberries. The kids snacked while I caught Steve up on the happenings of the mornings (and, okay, also snuggled on him).

Gracie's numbers were looking better by then, and the pediatrician finally came around while Steve was there (he recognized the hubs and said, "Hi, Dr. Steve!"). He said she was stable enough to go home that afternoon and that he would get the paperwork started soon. Then he joked around with Gracie (who really got her sass on for him) and declared her a "knucklehead," which I think she took as a compliment.

They took out her cannula and she immediately started scaling the hospital bed. :)

After Steve and Charlie went home Gracie got a couple of calls on her personal line, which she insisted on answering herself. Daddy called her twice, and she also got a call from Mimi (below), which began, "Oh! Hi, Mimi! Yeah, I'm just hanging out at my Daddy's school..."

It was kind of funny to see her grappling with old-school technology. First the VHS tapes, then the corded phone (she couldn't figure out which side to talk into and which to listen to).

Several hours later the nurse finally came in to take the "sunshine" off of Gracie's toe, and a resident returned to fill me in on her meds for the next few days. When the nurse asked if she was ready to go home, Grace sort of half-nodded, like she knew she was supposed to want to go home, but didn't really. Who would want to leave room service, crayons, and non-stop Disney films?

Once she was unhooked, though, our girl was thrilled to get out of her hospital bed and gown and back into some normal clothes. I snapped some pictures of our digs while she freshened up in the bathroom.

My "bed" and one of our three bags of gear. :)

Gracie's bed, tray table, and view of the TV.

I was sorely tempted to take these towels because they were SO impressively ugly (and, yes, anti-theftily labeled "HOSPITAL").

And then we were finally ready to go home! I was all set to sling our bags over my shoulder and walk her to the elevator when Gracie exclaimed to the departing nurse, almost frantically, "I WANT A WHEELCHAIR!!!!"

She was so enthusiastic that I couldn't deny her. I mean, look at this face:

She definitely didn't need a wheelchair at that point (albuterol and prednisone had her on a pretty good drug-induced energy high) but she really loved being her own little parade on that ride through the hospital. She waved to all the nurses on her way out and then snuggled her elephant blissfully in the elevator and outside. So even though it took an extra fifteen minutes of in-hospital time to wait for a chair and attendant, I think we both felt that it was definitely worth it.

We've been home for a couple days now, and she seems to be picking right up where she left off. She is full of beans and busy with coloring and pretending, and did just fine at preschool yesterday. Her doctor appointment yesterday cleared her of the albuterol, and she just has to finish out her prednisone and she's done with meds.

Even though a lot of it was fun for Gracie, it was scary for Steve and I. We were lucky to have lots of people praying for us (and our friend Mark joined Steve in the hospital to give Grace a healing blessing--so thankful for the priesthood and for friends willing to leave their homes in the middle of the night to help us out!) and to have a wonderful team of doctors and nurses looking after our baby. It made my heart hurt, walking through the children's hospital and knowing that some people were there for much scarier or harder reasons than we were. We're both still a little raw, I think. The first night home I checked her breathing a couple times in the dark.

So good to have this sweet thing around. I actually really enjoyed listening to her chatter and thoughts during our little hospital sleepover/date. I like hearing her brain work. At one point she explained to me that Mallificent was tricking Prince Phillip, but that it isn't nice to trick people. :) She had a lot to say about the world around her and the things we watched on TV and just everything, and it was fun to be near her all day long to hear it all. As far as hospital visits go, it was a pretty good one.