Monday, September 18th - Day 456 Update

Tori appeared to be doing better Sunday afternoon but Sunday evening and early Monday morning was just like Friday night as Tori cried all night and basically didn't sleep at all... We checked her temperature Monday morning and it was 103.5 degrees and she was also at 4-5 liters of oxygen through her nasal cannula. She needed that to maintain a 88 to 94 blood oxygen level. When she coughed she was clearly in pain and a thick, green phlegm was also present. So it was indeed PCMC time for Tori and us once again.

Maria and Grandma Schmanski arrived at the PCMC ER just after 12:30pm and I arrived about an hour later. Tori had a chest xray and several KUB abdominal scans. The good news is that they actually looked fine!! The ER physician could hear a little crackling in Tori's upper airway but her lungs were in pretty good shape. We are quite sure though that she aspirated during some of her vomiting episodes. The interesting observation is that Tori has Hand, foot and mouth disease or Coxsackie virus. She has sores all throughout her mouth, tongue and throat and that is why she is in so much pain. It hurts for her to swallow or couch. We spent the afternoon debating what we were going to do which was check her into the PCMC CMU or bring her home. This time we opted to bring her home where we will care for her and administer her antibiotics ourselves. It seems that every time Tori stays at the PCMC she becomes sicker and we end up there for weeks... So we are going to try some home treatment this time :-)

The ER physician notified us that normal procedure was to admit Tori but he knew us and had confidence that she would be just fine or better with us at home. Several other physicians that we know we also in the ER and had no reservations against our strategy. We did promise them to have Tori's home physician pay a visit after a day or so to check her out and if Tori should take a turn for the worst we would immediately bring her back up to the PCMC.

So we are all thankfully home tonight!! Tori is getting clindamycin to stop any possible pneumonia and is getting a maalox and benedryl combination to counter the hand, foot and mouth issues. We will continue to give her pedialyte as her stomach continues to settle.

Tori is resting fairly comfortably next to me tonight as I write this update. We will still leverage motrin every six hours and tylenol to ease Tori's pain as much as possible. Lortab and dilaudid can also be used but we are hoping to be past that. Since no one really slept in the house all weekend we NEED a great night of sleep tonight to catch up.

Thank you all for your continued love, support and prayers,

The Schmanski's