ER

Saturday we planned to drive north to Seattle.
Our allergist told me that a grass pollen count of 30 parts per cubic meter is relatively high in other areas. She told me that in the lovely Willamette Valley in June ('grass seed capitol of the world'!), the counts are easily in the hundreds. I checked the official counts on the aaaai website for last week and grass was at 871 parts per cubic meter!!! No wonder I can't walk out to the car without having the sniffles for a few minutes afterwards! Both James and I are allergic to grass.

So he's been fairly sniffly and just this week coughing a lot. I was a bit discouraged to think he may be asthmatic like his Mom and brother. Anyway, the cough was getting worse and worse and by the time we needed to leave town it became clear to me that he was not up to the journey. We talked with the triage nurse who ordered us straight to Urgent Care. We quickly called our insurance, which shall remain nameless, for where to go in Corvallis. Apparently, they have no agreements in Corvallis and suggested an hour's drive north or south. The urgency of his wheezing and coughing continued to increase, and they permitted us to go straight to Corvallis' ER.

So up we drive to the ER with a screaming, wheezing, hysterical 5-yr-old. A few minutes on the nebulizer and a chest X-ray later we find out James has pneumonia in his right lung! His younger siblings sat wide-eyed and motionless watching the blur of nurses and doctors.

After two days of antibiotics James is still hacking and not eating much, but playing and running again. He ended up sleeping much of the trip north and arriving late at night to sleep again. I keep running through my mind why things happened as they did. Why I did not see his illness sooner? Praise God for ERs. We have had one or two medical crises in places that do not have them, so I am thankful. Maybe it was better for us to have no insurable place to go for urgent care. We ended up having an X-ray and reading it 5 minutes later!

And just as the nurse suggested, James can now tell his big story of his trip to the Emergency Room! =)