Another Trip to the Hospital

Thursday was like any other day....super busy. Emma went to school, came home, did her homework, and then we went look at a new ballet school. She was her normal self all day (although her teacher tell me she was complaining of a back ache all day).

Right before bed she mentioned that her chest was hurting. I pulled out her peak flow meter (which checks how much air she can blow out), it was a little low so I did a neb treatment and then put her to bed.
At about 10pm she woke up crying and screaming like she did two weeks ago. I did the peak flow again and it was down to 30 (210 is ideal, under 100 means call the doctor). I tried another breathing treatment and some ibuprofen but that didn't seem to be doing any good. She was struggling to breathe. We decided she needed to go to the ER.
Once we got to the ER, she seemed to be doing a little better, but within 30 mins of sitting there she was back to screaming. The doctor did a chest xray, and listened to her heart. He said she had a heart murmur and her chest xray with abnormal. He felt that she needed to be admitted but wanted her to be seen by a pediatric cardiologist (yes...I was FREAKING out at that point). He said he wanted to transfer her by ambulance to Emanuel Children's Hospital. So, at 4am we were taken to Emanuel.
Once there the admitting doctor came in and did an eval, agreed that her xray was not normal and requested echo and a cardiology consult for the morning.
By 5am everyone left us alone to sleep for a few hours. At 7am the doctors started pouring in. We had first 2 medical students that did an eval, then an attending and her 4 residents came through (each taking turns listening to Emma and asking a MILLION questions). The attending told me that they thought Emma had a enlarged chamber in her heart, but they needed it confirmed by the ECHO.
Next was Dr. Steve, he is Emma's rehab doc that we had an appointment to see that day (I guess he decided he would come up for the appointment). He was there to check out her scoliosis (that we just discovered). He did a once over and ordered a scoliosis xray (thank goodness it looks like it is slowly progressing. They found an xray from last year where it was missed and it's only moved 3 degrees in a year. YAY!). After Dr. Steve, Emma had an Echo. Then we had a nice quiet period of quiet. Emma got a much needed nap. Late afternoon the cardiologist came in and said the ECHO looked normal but he wanted to look around himself, so he did another ECHO on her. He found that all the structures looked normal. He said he was still concerned by the abnormal xray so he ordered a CT scan. The CT came back that her heart is completely normal (HUGE sigh of relief), BUT there is fluid at the bottom of her lung. The attending said normally that would mean it was pneumonia, but she still wasn't sure because this started two weeks ago and she has had NO other symptoms. She said almost always there would be fever or at least a cough. She said she wanted to get another look at the lung. She couldn't get another CT scan because it has too much radiation, so they did another xray. The xray confirmed that there is a dark spot surrounded by fluid, which the doctor felt pretty confident that it was pneumonia. She sent us home with two different kinds of antibiotics to make sure it goes away. We are to have her ped check her several times to make sure it goes away. If it doesn't then we have to go to a pulmunologist to have a lung study done. I guess they go in and take some fluid out and test it. Please pray that it's pneumonia and we don't have to put her through that.

So, that was our fun weekend. Lets hope that is her last trip to the hospital, this poor little girl has spent WAY too much time sick in her short life.