Yesterday's adventure

Trying to nap, crib or no crib.

Brandt got to take his second ER trip yesterday (the first being when we flew him out to Seattle in April), and like everything else that happens with this kiddo, there's a bit of a back story. This one isn't terribly long, but I bet if I try hard enough, I can turn it into a novel. Wanna watch?

Tuesday night was a rough one for Brandt. He had a hard time going to sleep in the first place, and then woke up crying around 2:00 and wouldn't go back to sleep. Figuring it was teeth, I dosed him with Motrin and rocked him while we waited for it to kick in. More than an hour later, he finally let me lay him down...only to wake up again at 5:00. This time I gave him a bottle, which was acceptable (take one glance at him, and it'll be no surprise that this boy never turns down food), but still didn't really comfort him. He was still fussy as he went back to sleep, and the entire morning, absolutely nothing made him happy.

I noticed during the course of the morning that he had a slight fever. Not sure what it was exactly, because our thermometer has been collecting dust in the pen jar on the kitchen counter for months, as it keeps insisting that no one in this house has a body temperature of over 94*. You could say it's a little inaccurate. One might also suggest that it's time to invest in a new one...and I wouldn't disagree. But I digress. So, slight fever, but I disregarded it for the time being, because he'd already had a dose of Motrin, which reduces fevers. I figured I'd reassess when it wore off, so I could more accurately tell what was going on.

Hanging out with Joseph...one month
older and MUCH more mobile.

Never really got a chance to do that, though, because as I was feeding him lunch, I noticed that he was looking abnormally blue. Blue lips, pale tongue, large dark circles around his eyes, dusky hands...even his legs were grey. It was concerning enough to check him on the pulse-ox, which showed 67% -- roughly 15-20% lower than his usual. So I put in a call to Dr. Ruggerie, who, wouldn't you know it, had chosen this exact day to be out of town. Off to the ER we went.

Thankfully, Kirstyn was staying with us, so I was able to leave Wade home for naptime. Brandt, however, got to spend two hours in a tiny little cubicle being poked and prodded. By the time we got there, he was pink and non-feverish, but they took me seriously, thankfully, after learning some of his history, and he actually became something of an object of interest to all the staff. (One student even came in after things settled down to ask if she could listen to his murmur because she'd never had a chance to hear a post-Glenn heart!)

After being checked in and filling them in on my concerns, the doctor in charge told me bluntly that there was a good chance they'd have to transfer us somewhere (I assumed Seattle, but I'm not sure what he had in mind), because they didn't have the facilities to deal with a case like his. Thankfully, they managed to get a hold of Dr. Ruggerie, who calmed everyone down by deducing it was probably caused by the minor fever he'd had that morning.

Wade was tickled when we came across
some firefighters cleaning their truck, and
they were nice enough to let him do some
exploring in it.

When a body has a fever, it has to compensate in quite a few ways. The heart beats faster, for one, which causes higher respirations, which can often lead to dehydration (not in this case). All of the above require extra oxygen. In a normal person, that's no big deal. We've got a little extra to spare, so if we drop from 100% to 90%, there's no cause for concern. Brandt, on the other hand, has no buffer, and when his body starts sucking oxygen, we can get results like we saw that afternoon. Interesting how all the body systems link up like that.

Anyway, we went on our merry way after that, on the condition that we show up in Dr. Ruggerie's office this morning at 10:00. I figured it would just be a quick look-see, but we ended up being there for two and a half hours. Yuck. It led to some peace of mind, however, because the echo and chest X-ray's looked great. He did suspect, however, that a contributing factor to yesterday's cyanosis was that his pulmonary arteries had been spasming...something that he suspects has happened before, when he had his blue spells prior to his Glenn. So it's technically recurring, but so infrequently that it isn't really a huge worry.

Best thing about Home Depot is the super fun carts with
steering wheels. 

CHD's (congenital heart defects), I learned today, are about more than just the structure of the heart. That's generally how they're classified -- single ventricle, hypoplastic left heart, transposition of the great arteries, etc -- but when a heart is formed wrong, there's usually some defects of varying degrees in the blood vessels around it, in the muscle itself (this is where Brandt's heart failure seemed to stem from), or in other organs. We suspect that the thin layer of muscle in his pulmonary arteries isn't quite up to par, and is more easily stressed than it should be. One of his medications actually assists in relaxing them, so we upped his dosage on that a little bit.

Nothing to remark on re: function...it's still functioning to the best of its ability, and he's still not in heart failure, so essentially, no news is good news in that regard.

So, summing up, we had a scare, and now it's done and we move on! It's my favorite kind of scare. I don't like the ones that lead to life flights. To be honest, when they mentioned transferring us, I had a slight moment of panic, because I couldn't even have someone pack me a bag because I am SO bad about doing laundry that my only clean pair of jeans were currently being worn. I figured I was doomed to spend the next few weeks in the same outfit because, well, Karma. That'll teach me to let my husband run out of socks.

And yes, I did put in a load the minute I got home. If there's one thing having a heart baby has taught me, it's to never get so behind on laundry that I can't pack a last-minute hospital bag. Lesson learned.

(In case you hadn't noticed, these pictures in no way correlate to the topic on hand...but studies have shown that long blog posts are much easier to digest when there are pictures of cute hoodlums interspersed.)