We had a tough week: Pneumonia

Two weeks ago, everyone got sick that was home.

I called home and Holly said they were all sick: Holly, Mark, Luke, and John. Well, everyone but Meg and me got sick. They were all coughing and hacking, having trouble sleeping, blowing their noses. The usual, I figured. Just in the summer instead of the winter.

When I went home for the weekend after fishing, I did like I  usually do and pretend I never get sick. We ate at the same table, drank out of the same cups, lolled around in the bed sleeping in until 6:45 Am or so.

So I went out fishing again, expecting everyone to be better by the time I returned again on Thursday or so. Then Holly took Mark to the clinic on Monday because he did not seem to be getting better.

When I called from the fishing grounds on Monday night, Holly said she’d taken him to the clinic and the diagnosis was not good at all from Dr. Nobel Anderson: pneumonia!. But, that he’d probably be better by Wednesday if the antibiotics worked. So I didn’t think too much of it again, but I could here him coughing in the background. But no one wants pneumonia!

We got home at night and I went in to the room and listened to him. He sounded awful: very short breaths, very rapid, interrupted by extreme coughing and hacking, followed by more restless sleep. Also, he was on the floor instead of in his bunk (well, all three boys were on the floor). When I talked to Holly, she said he did not have the strength to get into his top bunk.

She said he seemed slightly better on Wednesday, so she hadn’t taken him to the clinic. We decided to give it another day. I tried to get him to drink some fluids as he lay in his perch on the couch all day, but he would only take a weak sip from time to time, and ate no food. Holly said he’d lost five pounds by Wednesday. He hadn’t been to the bathroom except a couple times a day, with almost no urine splashing off the walls. That was a joke. I meant no urine production.

Thursday night was a tough night. Long coughing spells, night terrors, and small rapid, shallow breaths. I decided to take him to the clinic first thing on Friday Morning. They checked his O2 saturation right away and put him on Oxygen, as he was down below 90%, and then took a good look at him and decided to start hydrating him with a saline drip that would allow a quick dose of new antibiotics as well. Adam was Mark’s nurse and did a great job, especially in the X-Ray room where Mark almost collapsed from fatigue just trying to stand up in front of the big red X.

Holly, John, and I took turns reading to him throughout the day and by 2 PM on Friday it was obvious he was doing better, but his 02 SAT was still too low. while on 2L/min O2, his O2 SAT was at 96-99%, but whenever we took him off the O2 and let him breathe just room air, his O2 SAT would tank, dropping down to 89-91% within a few minutes. The clinic said he had to go to Juneau. They just did not have the 24 hour care needed to make sure he was okay. Ron Horn came by to see if we needed anything before we left.

They said, that in kids they don’t worry too much about cardiac arrest, it’s respiratory arrest that gets them. Well, I didn’t have anything to argue about, there. I asked if we could take an O2 bottle and an O2 Saturation tester to take home, but they said no, it wasn’t worth the risk, plus it wasn’t policy. Mark had a fun time trying to keep his saturation level up above 96%. In the photo above, you can see his Saturation level is at 97%.

Plus there was a pediatrician in Juneau who was good with this type of thing. The clinic called up the medivac team and we went to Juneau. First we were in the ER for about four hours because they were backed up with patients. The nurse in the ER saw his excellent O2 Sat numbers and immediately took him off the O2. It took about 45 minutes for his O2 SAT to drop, but it did: right back down to 88 at one point.

At about that time, the pediatrician showed up and looked at things and decided to keep him for the night at 2 LPM O2, and changed his antibiotics to two other drugs, and move him upstairs where he’d be monitored. They put us in a negative pressure room that kept all the germs in. And boy did they keep the germs in. I got sicker than a dog in that room—I’ve never been that sick in my life: vomiting, diarrhea, back pain, and I won’t even go into what happened to my prostate! I was so sick I checked myself in the ER and signed up for some meds. Thankfully, I ran into Penny Fossman, and I was able to borrow a vehicle to run some errands (get some meds). Thanks Penny!

The worst moment, for me personally, was in Wal-Mart, when I had to sprint to the bathroom to avoid vomiting on the good folks at the pharmacy.

It was kind of weird to have everyone wearing masks around us. But what could we say? “We really did just brush our teeth!” No. I couldn’t really blame them. In the picture above you can se the ante room where both doors have to be closed before one can be opened again. On the other hand, he did have a cool bed with lots of controls for the middle and each end, plus a handy lit-up button that would reach the nurse without-fail via an intercom. I’m still not quite sure if we just happened to get this negative pressure room, or if it was necessary, but by the second day, the masks weren’t really in use any longer.

Right before the second night started, at around 7 PM, they took him off O2 and let him breathe room air for a while. His O2 SAT dropped from 99% to 95% and leveled off. cool. She said we’d be able to leave in the morning if that kept up through the night.

Holly, Meg, and Holly’s brother John, took the ferry down that night and stayed in this room at the Bartlett House across the street from Bartlett Hospital. In the morning I went there to rest, as I was still sick and my back started to ache whenever I wasn’t lying down. At around noon Mark was discharged from Bartlett and he and Holly went on a Costco run for an hour, then they came back and we all crashed.

We took the Ferry home the next morning. but I was still sick, nausea and weariness.

Thank God Mark is better now. He is not back to his old self yet. He still lies on the couch some of the time, but he’s taking his meds, drinking his fluids, and resting like he’s supposed to. I’m not sure what the next step is. Presumably, he’ll have a full recovery and be sprinting up and down the court dribbling at full speed again someday. Well, that’s the hope.

As soon as Mark’s aunt Dorothy Beeman (Margaret’s sister) heard that Mark was sick, she put together a care package for him with a new shirt, a new hoodie and two boxes of honey-nut cheerios! They were in the mail when we got home and greatly cheered him up! Bless Dorothy for her kind heart!

Thanks to Bonnie Shanrbroich for the bread & jam, Lucinda Boyce for the Geos (they were a great success), and to Serena Badgley for taking care of the younger two boys so Mark could rest. Thanks also to Bob and Margaret who ‘camped’ with the younger two boys for two nights while we were in Juneau.

Thanks to all for your thoughts and prayers—Matt, Holly, Mark, Luke, John Caleb, and Meg.

Concusion?

Luke had a bad fall onto a sharp object which put a big lump on his head and cause him to scream loudly.  He did not pass out but cried all the way up the stairs at the Horn’s house.  He looked terrible and laid in his mother’s arms for a while as limp as a noodle.  After a bit, I took a turn holding him and he promptly threw up all over himself and me.

The poor little guy.  He’s so dear.

I checked his pupils and they seem to constrict and dilate rapidly when the light varies so I think the blow wasn’t too bad. But we came home and put him straight to sleep.

Keep him in your prayers.

Now I’m sick.

Bummer.

Best Burgers in Anchorage: Tony’s Burger Stop

Does anyone CARE what I ate for lunch? 

Usually, I just eat the cheapest, healthiest meal I can find that will leave my blood-sugar level at an even keel. And usually, that’s two bean & cheese burritos that I buy by the package at $4.80 for 10 burritos. I love this meal, because it’s cheap, easy to fix, relatively healthy, and does not put my on the blood-sugar roller coaster.

But today, I was in Anchorage.  And I wanted to go to Red  Robin.  I told Jack to take us to the place in town with the best burgers and was expecting to be taken to some national chain restaurant with a clean floor, tons of space, a TV going in the background, and a few options. 

Instead, we went to a tiny little out of the way shop downtown.  The building was lousy, the seating was minimal, the ambiance had left much to be desired, but was better than having a TV going, and the refrigerator was WAY too loud.  But their burgers were Awesome.

The thing I liked about the burger is that it had a dark, almost burnt crisp exterior, but a nice juicy red interior.  I opted for the swiss mushroom burger, the curly fries, and about 14 oz of ketchup.  It was really good, juicy, and messy.  It was not crowded, but we weren’t there on a weekday.

The potatoes turned out GREAT

Holly says…

I think it would be best to use a straight concentration of ACV to soak them in, to get them a bit more zing.  They dried out overnight and curled up as dry as can be.  I think they’d be great for dipping just about anything into, but they don’t really have that salty addictive taste that I’d like in a chip, as I had to add too much water to the ACV.

Today we shot the Mosquito Lake School shots, then I shot the Cross country Team, then shot the community photos, and then some volleyball.  It was a really busy day.

Nobody cares what we ate for dinner!

Tonight was left-over night…

One of the books I really want to get is a blogging book entitled: “No one cares what you ate for breakfast”  As you can tell by this post, I need to buy that book.

Tonight, Holly and the older two boys ate left over beans and rice, with chips and cheese and I ate left-over pasta with olive oil & parmesan cheese.

When I was growing up, Dad bought a dairy farm and everyone thought that milk was necessary for healthy bones and strong teeth, so we bought milk by the gallons.  With current research it’s pretty well established that the societies that consume the greatest amounts of milk have the highest rates of osteoporosis.  Interesting.  It wouldn’t be so bad if the milk was actually neutral, in terms of its contribution to health, but it turns out that much of the evidence points to milk actually contributing to poor health, especially as we get older.  Bummer. 

Now, the only time I buy milk now is when family comes from out of town to stay with us (and I’m happy to do it, ’cause I love ’em).  I figure we save about $10 per week by always drinking water with our dinners.  We do buy powdered milk to cook with.

I’m not a total idiot though, Milk still has it’s rightful place at the table: tonight, the only thing John Caleb ate for dinner was milk.

Two most vibrant factors in your day-to-day existence…

Here’s an interesting thought I read recently…

The two most important factors in your day-to-day existence are: 1) your finances and  2) your weight. 

This my seem superficial. But if you think about it, when you can’t pay your bills and you can’t fit into your clothes, it ruins your day. 

I always like to make fun of the superficiality found in the the public eye: in the media, in our lifestyles, and in advertisements. But when I think about the things that are portrayed on a daily basis and the methods used to sell things, we mainly see two types of people in ads: people who are beautiful and who have money: Beauty and Wealth.

The beauty thing, in America really boils down to what things, as portrayed by the media?  Help me out with some comments here.  And likewise, how does the media get at the financial component of well being with its imagery?

So here’s the logical conclusion of this argument:  1) eat healthfully every day and 2) spend less than you earn.

What are your thoughts on this?  Is this the key to happiness?  What’s missing here?  I could go argue either side of this with and it’d be fun, but it’s time for bed.  Tell me what you think by clicking on the comments section.

I read this on Gary Fong’s site the other day the other day, by the way.  Also, in case you were wondering, the juxtaposition of the text in this post and the content of the photos was purposeful.

The days are getting longer: Time for a Trip to the beach!

If we pretend really hard, we can imagine we have a nice, warm, sunny beach with soft hot sand and a snow drift twenty feet high…

The weather has been impossibly beautiful  out here in Haines lately.  The wind has been out of the north, bringing in the cool air from the interior so the skies have been clear and the sun bright.  The days have been stunningly beautiful, but quite chilly.  It was below twenty on a few mornings lately.

We simply had to go to the beach and give the boys some run-around and throw rocks time.  Having boys leads to that type of activity.

John Caleb is really thriving, he is starting to vocalize a bunch when surrounded by family and in a familiar setting and he’s gaining weight fast.

Physically, he’s gaining skills everyday.  Just today he started pushing his torso up to nearly 90 degrees, which is really good for a four month old according to the baby books we have on the shelf.

Luke is really learning to communicate well too and is getting his point across when speaking.  Although we have not made much forward progress on the potty training since we had him at the day care center with Kim Larson: she’s a miracle worker when it comes to potty training.

In other news, I went to the doctor to get his opinion on why my knee has been hurting and he things I have a torn left medial meniscus and didn’t think any physical therapy would help. His verdict was I have three options: 1) take up to three Ibuprofen per day four times a day to relieve the swelling and reduce the pain 2) have him remove the swelling by removing the fluid and injecting it with some cortisone 3) get orthoscopic surgery to have the meniscus smoothed out again.  He didn’t think footwear would make a difference. 

I do believe that the meniscus is torn, but do not think the pain is great enough to start in on any treatment at this point, but I am an active guy and may well rue the day I decided not to get surgery before the gillnetting season.

What I find interesting is that only one knee is bothering me.  Why not both knees?  I don’t remember ever having any sort of catastrophic injury on that knee.

Mark is sicker than a dog…

Mark was sick all day yesterday, throwing up regularly, I hear.  He vomitted once while I was home–blueberries.  From across the room, in the bottom of the pan, they actually looked kind of good…

Let’s not think about that.

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I got a new HD in the mail yesterday.  It’s the new 750 GB seagate drive–so far, I have no complaints at all and would highly recommend it to anyone needing gobs of storage.  It initialized and formatted with no problems.  I formatted it using NTFS, which is by far my favorite file system, as it is much easier to recover files from and also is much quicker to defrag than FAT or FAT32.

Since my computer has an ExpressCard slot instead of the misnamed legacy PCMCIA slot of yesteryear, I had to get some new peripherals so I got to expresscard adapters.  One came in the mail yesterday and is a two port eSATA adapter which allows speeds much faster than USB 2.0.  I moved 54 gigs over to the drive in about two hours and five minutes using ACDSee, which is not a good way to test the raw speed, since the thumbs are being created simultaneously, I believe.

The external case I go for the drive was an Azio eSATA + USB 2.0 Aluminum housing which, SO FAR, I can freely recommend.  In the package was included the AC-adapter, a nice flexible USB 2.0 cable, and also a thick two ended eSATA cable that seems to have sheilding built in.  The eSATA connectors seem a bit more robust than either firewire or USB cables: and that’s a good thing.  I bought the package on ebay for $320 with shipping.

Holly wanted me to stay home and help with the boys so I wasn’t able to go to church choir practice.