Home for a Month, Now Back in the Hospital

When we were discharged from the hospital last time, I had said that my personal goal was to get to stay at home for a whole month. Well, on Wednesday, it had been a whole month. Now we're back at the hospital. Lynnea has had a cough all week, and Wednesday evening it started to get worse than it had been earlier in the week, so, yesterday we called her Home Health nurse to come and check her to see if it sounded like she had anything in her lungs. The nurse said she was wheezing a little bit, and recommended that we have her seen at the hospital. We called the hospital to let them know, and of course, they insisted that we have her seen by her primary care physician at the Zimmerman clinic. Well, that's a little complicated considering that Dr. Ferry, her primary doctor, very abruptly left the clinic a couple of weeks ago and we haven't actually chosen anyone new, plus, when we called the clinic to see if anyone was available to see her, they told us that they didn't have any available appointments with anyone all day (and our clinic doesn't have any urgent care hours). So, this left us with the only option being taking Lynnea to the E.R. We had the choice of taking to the U of M, or to Princeton, and for some reason we chose Princeton (because they're a whole lot closer, they're a much smaller hospital which we hoped would mean a shorter wait in the E.R., and a small part of me was still really hoping that, when they took her chest X-ray, there would be nothing significant and we could simply go home). After spending nearly four hours in the E.R. in Princeton, the cardiologist at the U told the doctor in Princeton that he wanted us to come in. Lynnea's chest X-ray was clear for the most part -- no signs of pneumonia or fluid, but the fear was that her cough could be a sign of heart failure, so they wanted to do another echocardiogram. We arrived at the U of M around 9:45pm, and we went to the E.R. because the cardiology fellow was still hoping that, if they did an echo and it looked OK, we wouldn't have to actually be admitted to the hospital. Well, her echo looked pretty good, but her cough is awful, they ended up admitting us anyway. Respiratory Therapy gave her a nebulizer treatment, but that only helped a little bit. She's on oxygen support because her saturation levels are lower than they would like (she's sitting in the 60's - low 70's, but they would really like to see her in the high 70's). They are testing for viruses, and so far the rapid responses for influenza and RSV have come back negative. The doctors still haven't done morning rounds (because it's Friday, and the cardiology team always rounds late on Fridays) so I'm not sure what the plan is from here. If I had to guess, I'd say they're going to want to watch her for a few days to see whether she gets any better (or any worse, for that matter) and we'll make a plan from there.