Pneumonia in May

Most people can do General Practioners or pediatricians and that's enough, but my family seems to need teams of specialists.

So we're in the hospital with this "pretty good case" of pneumonia (for a 2 year old or an adult, I'm not sure which) according to the pulmonary specialists. They say it's not the worst they've ever seen, but pretty impressive nonetheless.

So the first day we see a Dr Chris O-Something or other who turns out to be an Asthma and Cystic Fibrosis specialist. So I mention that I had tested positive during my pregnancy as a CF carrier and that we had tested Eran and he came up negative. I even went so far as to produce the letter stating that (in Hebrew - but hey it had the exact strain in English and with our translation that was enough for the doctors) This whole thing sparked Dr O's interest and they ordered a CF test done on my little man anyway since he could have any one of the other strains. Luckily the test was pretty non-invasive, just a simple 2 hour sweat test on his legs. But waiting for the results is agonizing. We got off lucky. Jonathan is CF free.

So meanwhile, the doctors have ordered 3 different strong IV antibiotics to be administered to fight the pneumonia while we're in the hospital. And the pulmonary specialist who we saw at the end wanted to send him home on an oral antibiotic that would have had to clear the Center for Infectious Diseases approval. Since they weren't exactly sure what strain of bacteria was causing the pneumonia (if any), they didn't get approval for that particular drug, but they sent him home on some other oral antibiotic that they suggested I supplement with Hershey's kisses to counteract the diarrhea. For some reason, my son is not a big chocolate or cookies fan. Go figure. But I sent extra kisses to daycare for the poor soul who was elected to fight with him to give him his meds during the day.

So anyway, mom is pregnant and can take Mr man down to the X-ray room, but cannot actually be in the room when they do the X-rays to see how the pneumonia is progressing or rather resolving. This is almost done every other day. And he starts crying the minute we step into that room with those big machines.

At this point, Jonathan is not very verbal. A few two word sentences is about the extent of his actual verbal capacity (and his name for me is "Me" - quite confusing sometimes), but he is very insitent about getting his views known in other ways...pointing and crying and whining mostly. And at this point we are still wondering if he is speech delayed because of his constant ear infections (hence the ear tubes a month earlier) or if it is something to do with his congenital CMV (hearing loss and other development delays are the earmarks of CMV at this stage - we get to wonder until age 4 or 5 I guess) I wonder how much non-verbal clues kids actually pick up on. Sometimes I didn't like the person who brought us down in the elevator for our routine chest x-rays and I was definately stressed out about the whole situation.

The good thing is that they eventually let us go home on oral antibiotics, with a follow-up X-ray in 2 weeks to see that the progression of the pneumonia is still good.