Foothills

Today, I had the opportunity to drive by the foothills near us that were engulfed with the fires back in October. I was very pleased to see how green everything was, and that there were wild flowers blooming in orange, purple and yellow. It was not nearly as green and vibrant last spring. The green of spring is one thing I miss from back home. Every April and May in Minnesota, I always enjoyed watching the trees bud, and everything turn green. I think it only gets really green here in the spring after we have had a lot of rain, like we have had this year. Otherwise, it has not seemed to get as vibrant. I also miss the blue sky. We have so much smog here that the sky is never really blue.

My daughter is getting over pneumonia. It has been a heckuva week and a half around here. She has been to the doctor's office, the urgent care, and the ER over at CHOC since February 27th. She had the influenza, and because she has asthma, it ended up turning into pneumonia. We spent last Saturday night in the ER because her fever was not responding to either Tylenol or Motrin. Plus her breathing had deteriorated. They took a chest x-ray, and sure enough, she had pneumonia. She missed 5 days of school and is really behind on her homework, but she is doing so much better than she was a week ago.

At CHOC, they triage the children through St. Joseph's Hospital ER(which is connected), and when we got there the waiting room was overflowing. I thought we would be waiting for hours just to be triaged. While we were waiting to be called back (we got called back within 20 minutes of arriving), K threw up. Poor thing. So we had to get the janitor out there to clean up, because we did not get her to the trash can in time. Later she apologized for throwing up on my leg (she was concerned about that). I told her that she did not need to worry about that at all, that I just wanted her to get better.

I was really impressed with all but one of the CHOC ER staff. The nurses, the resident physician, the attending physician, and one out of two of the respiratory therapists were awesome. The other respiratory therapist contradicted what everyone else was saying by telling me that K's lungs were perfectly clear. Everyone else had told us that her lungs had crackles and I could see that her intercostal and neck muscles were retracting while she was breathing. Her sats were at 92%, so I know she was not getting very much oxygen, and here is this RT, talking out his rear end about how K's lungs were clear. It was certainly unprofessional to say the least, since he contradicted two MDs.