The Bordner Family Blog: Hospital Visits

Most of you probably know by now that our sweet little Payton was in the hospital for a bit. It was a scary couple of weeks, but she's doing much better now. Thanks to all our friends, family and co-workers for thinking of us and sending Payton get-well wishes, bringing us dinners and lunches, and for just being there for us and helping out with Ryder. I wanted to especially thank my mom for all her help during this ordeal. She took time off from work to be with us. She sat with us at the hospital, she did our laundry, cleaned our house, played/fed/helped out with Ryder ... the list goes on and on. I don't think we could have sanely gotten through all of this without her!

Now about what happened ... as you may have seen from one of our previous posts, we took Payton into the doctor's office mid-January as she had a fever, raspy chest and a mild rash on her body. They checked her out and determined that she had bronchiolitis and sent us home with a nebulizer and some albuterol to give to her a couple times a day to help clear up the secretions in her chest. We followed instructions and felt we were on the mend.

The following Tuesday after Ryder's birthday party, we didn't feel like she was getting better. She got another fever, her cough was terrible and she was working really hard to breath. So we called the on-call nurse and they recommended we take her into the hospital. We took her to the ER that Tuesday morning and they admitted us for the night to monitor her breathing as her oxygen levels were hovering around 86 percent. They should be in the high 90's.

Payton and I stayed the night in the hospital and they discharged us the following day (on Ryder's actual birthday) after sucking some the secretions out of her lungs, giving her several rounds of various nebulizer treatments and watching her oxygen levels. We decided to keep her home from daycare the rest of the week to make sure she was getting healthy.

She was still coughing and sounded rattly in her chest the following Monday, but we felt that she was improving so we took her back into school. When we got home from work that night and picked the kids up from school, we noticed that Payton was very sleepy, had another fever and she really was working hard again to breath. We went back to the ER that night ... and were admitted to the hospital's pediatric ward at midnight. Poor Payton was poked, prodded and just generally irritated for the four days we were in the hospital. They did several x-rays of her chest, took her blood, gave her nebulizer treatments again and again. They couldn't figure out what was wrong with her. Imagine that feeling not knowing what is wrong with your baby. Why was she so sick? Why was she working so hard to breath? It was terrifying.

After spending the four days in the hospital they sent us to another local hospital because they specialized in pediatrics. We spent two nights there. While in the Pediatric ICU at the second hospital, they took Payton down to the operating room where the ENT and GI doctors inserted a bronchoscope to take a look in her lungs and GI tract (stomach, small & large intestines, etc).

The prognosis?

Payton has been aspirating into her lungs - either from her reflux or from nursing (apparently I am/was like a fire hose). They also found when performing the bronchoscope that she has a cleft larynx, which could have been an attributing factor to her aspirating. She also has an irregular suck/swallow. So by combining all of this together, the food/milk in her lungs was like a magnet to the series of respiratory colds she had, which was making it hard for her to breath and keep her oxygen levels up.

It was a frightening couple of weeks, but she's doing much better. Here are some pictures from our time in the hospital.