KAELI MEDICAL UPDATE

As many of you know, Kaeli has difficulties with allergy-induced asthma. Last week she gave us a good scare when she came home from school and had a heavy, wet cough and couldnt breathe. Thankfully we already have her "ER" meds on hand. It took 2 doses of her liquid albuterol to get things calmed down, and even then she had a really bad night.

Many of you also know that Kaeli gets nasty nose bleeds. Thankfully as she is getting older, she is learning to handle them more calmly. Along with her asthma going off the charts she had several heavy nosebleeds last week (along with Ky throwing up). We have a phone system that lets us use the phones as "walkie talkies" and she was able to "beep" me from ceana's phone to let me know she needed help. She had a couple in one night and then multiple days/nights after that. I was able to get upstairs and help her and get her settled back to bed calmly. This is much easier for both of us to handle vs last time when she woke up and then, not being all the way awake, searched the whole house for me while bleeding (through the whole house) - it was not fun clean up, besides that she was in hysterics that we couldnt get it stopped right away.

With all of these concerns I called and checked in with our dr office and talked with our cute nurse who agreed to squeeze kaeli in with colton's appt on friday. Sometimes I worry that I worry too much, that we are going to get down to the dr office for them to say nothing is wrong (like the girls "strep" virus on Easter). I am SO glad that I decided to take her down with us. Our dr was very concerned at how bad she was. Her lungs were very wet and not doing well. He sent us home with several prescriptions including 2 new albuterol inhalers, her daily disk inhaler AND prednisone - a heavy duty asthma med. He also sent us home with an antibiotic prescription to hang on to just in case the asthma decided to take a nose dive and turn into an infection or pnuemonia. Remember I said he is an angel. He took special time and care to make sure he checked her thoroughly, and to talk with her about everything she needed to do again.

In doing some thinking, we are supposing that the nosebleeds have been a combined result of the excessive heat we had last week and the allergies aggrivating her nasal membranes. She already drinks tons of water, but not sure how else to help her other than to continue to help her keep calm and how to take care of things when she does get them.

She has also been on a "timer" schedule with colton. The inhaler is every 4 hours, the disk inhaler 1x/day and the prednisone 1x/day. She also takes the liquid albuterol if none of those help (like she did a couple of nights ago) We found out on the first night that the prednisone had to be an AM med - the way she reacted to one of the side effects, it kept her awake for 12 straight hours - most of the night. Poor thing didnt get to sleep until 5am saturday. It has been a challenging learning experience. Thankfully Saturday was pretty quiet so she could rest as needed.

She took her inhaler with her to school today. I am hoping she has been allowed to keep it with her and take it every 4 hours. If she has had any concerns I will be making a phone call to the school tomorrow to make arrangements for her to have meds at school.

We are just waiting for a phone call back from our dr office to find out if/when we will need to make another follow up appt for both kaeli and colton and see if the meds have done their job this week.

It has been very tricky trying to coordinate and remember everyone's medications and staying on top of schedules. We are doing our best and hopefully the kids will make some good improvements this week with continued help and supervision. We will keep everyone posted if there are any changes or updates