Of ER visits and Mommy's Broken Elbow

So last night was a bit eventful.

Ollie had a great day on Saturday - his numbers were good and he was a chatty little guy. Then evening arrived.

After a simple diaper change and being turned over, he began to get the distressed look he often has when breathing becomes difficult. No big deal. We deal with this all the time. Well, this was definitely not a normal event. We cough-assisted and suctioned and even used a bit of blow-by oxygen to keep his numbers reasonable. Even after 45 minutes, without the O2 he would drop immediately to dangerously low saturation levels. When it got to the point that he was dropping even with oxygen, we called 911.

Raleigh FD and Wake County EMS responded with their usual rapidity. These fantastic folks always listen carefully and do their best to understand Ollie's special condition. So we get him loaded up in the ambulance and they are streaming a bit of oxygen and he's doing pretty well. Bekka thinks it's possible she dislodged the worst of the mucus plug just before we loaded him up.

We thought about going to Duke as that is where his doctors are, but learned an important lesson: The Wake County Ambulances do not have pure sine wave inverters. This type of inverter produces power identical to house current rather than the square wave or modified sine wave of the cheap inverters people often use in their car. We've been researching the best inverter/battery/charger combos out there so we would have portable power for all his equipment, but we hadn't bought anything yet (that's about to change!). Without the cough assist, we decided we needed to go ahead to WakeMed since it's so much closer (and they really have a wonderful pediatric ER).

So off we go to WakeMed with mommy in the ambulance and daddy following. It's not exactly routine, but we are pretty comfortable with the process. Our arrival at WakeMed is when it became a bit more complicated.

The EMTs unloaded Ollie from the ambulance and were headed inside. Bekka handed me the cough assist and went out the side door of the vehicle. I suggested we should hurry as they were wheeling Ollie inside.

That's when she tripped over the unpainted concrete bump/stop the ambulances back up to to unload.

She went down hard. Real hard.

Being super-mommy/super-trooper, she dusted herself off and limped into the ER. At first, everything seemed alright and we were focused on getting Oliver stabilized and x-rayed. Once that was accomplished (a big kudos to Barry the Wonder Nurse and all the staff at WakeMed) and Oliver was clearly doing well we had a doctor look at Bekka. He didn't think anything major was wrong, but was concerned enough to have her left elbow x-rayed. I was worried because it had gotten very stiff as the evening wore on.

So Bekka had an x-ray in the kiddy room (apparently the biggest patient the tech had ever seen, lol). When the x-rays came back, it was very apparent Bekka had a fracture at the tip of the radius bone in her elbow. It wasn't broken off, thankfully. The doctor ordered a rigid splint for her to go home in and referred her to the Orthopedics department. She'll need to visit them this week to find out if anything else will need to be done.

Her right arm is doing pretty well - it hurts when she moves it and grip is reduced, but is more functional than the left. If it doesn't get better over the next day or 2, she'll need to have it checked out in more detail when she sees the orthopedist.

As it is, she's going to be the one-armed mommy trying to do a job that can keep TWO people busy. We hopefully we'll be ramping up nursing assistance for Ollie soon, cross your fingers!!!

We got home about 6am. Man are we tired.