Cough, Cough, Pneumonia

Nathan was released from the hospital following the ETV on June 2nd.  That brought his totals to 156 days in the hospital and 109 days out of the hospital.

We were trying to be really hopefully with this procedure.  After all, not having a shunt is what we had prayed about nearly 6 months before when we first started dealing with hydrocephalus and shunts.  But at the same time, all of our previous bad experiences had made us somewhat paranoid looking for signs of drainage problems or anything else that would indicate that the ETV was not working.

But after a couple of weeks, Nathan started to show signs of possible problems.  So we took him in to the pediatrician and it turned out that he had pneumonia!  Which was not an issue with the ETV, but it still wasn't pleasant.

We started him on medication, but the pneumonia caused Nathan to develop a really nasty cough.  And when he would cough, he would usually cough so hard that it would cause him to gag which would then cause him to throw up.  And he coughed a lot!  We went through burp rag after burp rag after burp rag.  Which meant that we were doing Nathan's laundry every couple of days or so.

We were doing the best we could to keep him hydrated and everything else we could to keep him out of the hospital.  We were especially worried through a stretch of a couple of days where he was throwing up A LOT.

But the worst of it came one night during the middle of his sickness.  Nathan had woken up about 3am or so.  Bekah was in changing his diaper when he threw up.  While she was trying to clean him up and change his clothes, he was wanting to be picked up and held and comforted.  Then when she wasn't able to pick him up as quickly as he wanted, he got more upset and threw up several more times.

We were really, really worried at that point, so I gave Nathan a blessing.  Within a little while he had calmed down and was soon asleep.

The following days and nights were each successively better and his cough started to clear up as well.  Which was a big relief to us since Nathan was scheduled to be getting a G-Tube towards the end of the month.