For starters, thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers.. Here is our story of the past 72 hours...
(Parker, feeling pretty good Tuesday morning of his hospitalization.)
The past 3 days have been an absolute circus with us. With Brian gone speaking at the youth camp in Tennessee I had planned a trip to Tulsa for a few days to visit friends while he was gone. Monday night around 1:00am Parker began coughing and having major coughing fits through out the night out of no where! As the day went by on Tuesday I made the call just to pack us up and head back home to Fort Smith & take him to our pediatrician's office Wednesday morning. By 5:00pm that night I was at my good friend Jill's house letting our girls play together and we ate dinner there and were planning to head back to FSM after dinner. Parker woke up from a 3rd nap of the day with major retracting of his lungs and horrible wheezing and gasping for breath. My friend Jill had called a friend of her's from college who is a doctor at Tulsa Regional in the ER. He told me to come immediately and that he would be waiting there w/ a room available for us. Jill kept Mckenna for me and took care of her for me. I arrived around 6:30pm and went straight back at the ER.he received 3 rounds of breathing treatments and a round of antibiotics and they did some chest x-rays. The chest x-rays were clear at the time but as they listened to his rattling in his chest they diagnosed him w/ clinical pneumonia (which is the early stages where it just hasn't appeared in the x-rays yet) and wanted to admit him. Jill's husband, David came to the ER after he got off of work (he is an ICU Trauma nurse at another hospital in town) as well as Denise Lopez, our women's minister from our church we served at in Broken Arrow. I called my parents to come from Springdale to help me w/ McKenna so she would have some sort of "normalcy"in her daily routine while we were there w/ Parker. They arrived about 9:45pm and my Dad stayed at the hospital with me while Mom tended to McKenna. We didn't get into a room in the Pediatric ward until 1:00am and got to sleep around 3:00am after they got him all hooked up to monitors, given more breathing treatments, etc. After a LONG stay at the hospital they kept us for another day (Wednesday and Wed night) and he was slowly getting better and breathing better. McKenna was taking it pretty hard today however, not being w/ Brian or I and staying at Denise's home w/ my mom, she was all "out of sorts". So due to us all being in limbo, living in Tulsa scattered all over, my dad and I put the pressure on the doctors to consider letting us drive back to Fort Smith today and sending him home w/ his breathing treatments, because that was all the treatment they were doing at the hospital by this time today. They agreed he was progressing well and was well enough to travel and discharged us today at noon. So we are now back at home! Parker is doing MUCH better and I have an appt tomorrow with our pediatrician for a check up on his lungs and ears (he has an ear infection also). The doctors at Tulsa Regional also informed us that Parker was 1 of 7 patients that was admitted this week with pneumonia, which is so strange being that it is mid-June!!
(Parker on Wednesday afternoon)
In the midst of all of this craziness, McKenna also started coughing Tuesday so my mother took her to see our old pediatrician there to have her checked out since Parker started that same way and his progressed so rapidly into pneumonia. Her doctor agreed she was beginning to wheeze and discovered she also had an ear infection (no signs of that at all either!!) and started her on antibiotics, an oral steroid, and an inhaler as well. So mom had to take care of taking her to the doctor, getting her prescriptions filled, starting her on those, keeping up w/ her, while my dad and I were tending to Parker. All the while, I was trying to keep Brian updated on both of their status while he is in the "boon-docks" of Tennessee at this camp, bless his heart!
But God was with us through it all and is healing both my kids. Our friends and my parents were a COMPLETE God send and we felt the prayers from everyone while we were there. Somehow I have mustered up enough energy to stay with it this week running on only about 10 hours of sleep over the past 3 nights since his coughing episodes started Monday night. But now we are all back at home. The kids are bathed, drugged up and in bed asleep, and my parents just left to head back to Springdale.
Pray for them as they travel back and have to work tomorrow on little sleep as well, especially my dad since he was up at the hospital with me b/c we got hardly ANY sleep there between vital checks, breathing treatments and the nurses coming in every hour to monitor him.
Sorry this is update is so long, but I wanted to "tell the story" all at once to save from repeating it to so many different people.
Thank you for your prayers and continue to pray for Parker's complete recovery from his illnesses as well as little McKenna. We are all relieved and ecstatic to be back home! Pray for Brian too, as he will be flying back home tomorrow evening from Tennessee.
Blessings!!!
Jennifer Mills
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