Yuck!

I am writing from Schneider's Hospital in Long Island. We came out here for the week to do Therapies 4 Kids for just the week and Amelia got pneumonia. It started Sunday night right after we settled in for the night at the Ronald McDonald House. We had our first HBOT dive scheduled for Monday morning at 7am and then on to T4K's for 4 hrs and then back to HBOT for dive #2. We made it in for 2 hrs of PT and our afternoon dive. That night Amelia seemed fine and Tuesday we did our early morning dive and 4 hrs of PT. She did great, but her ears were really red, so we didn't do our afternoon dive. That night her fever spiked and this morning her fever was gone and she seemed good so we took her in for a couple hours of light therapy. Well, she could barely keep her head up. Her respirations went way up and we took her home to give her a breathing treatment. After the treatment Amelia's breathing was still so bad and she was burning up, so at our NYC Peds. advice, we took her to Schneider's Children's Hospital, where we spent 6 hrs in a room in the ER, where they took her for a chest x-ray and discovered that she has pneumonia in both lungs. They were started an antibiotic IV and admitted us to a room upstairs. So here I sit. I have a very pooped little girl, who is very angry about the splint on her arm keeping her from moving too much -- so as to save the IV -- which took 4 sticks (pricks) to get. What an awful thing to watch as three people -- drs. and nurses stand around trying to get a little needle into a tiny vein. The cries and howls are pretty unnerving.

The really good news is that Amelia is so strong now that we didn't need to give her oxygen or suction her -- which tells us how strong she's gotten. So that's the upside of this experience. Sucks that we're here, but good to see how different this visit is than the last one -- which was just about 2 years ago exactly.