WE'RE HOME!!!! We brought Hannah home from the hospital today. She went to Children's Hospital on Nov. 13. There are a lot of details we could put in, of course, blow-by-blow descriptions and such, but here's the gist of it, since she is already home.

On Nov. 12 she had been cranky and clingy all day. On the morning of Nov. 13 we couldn't get her to completely wake up (she even fell back asleep while having her diaper changed) and so couldn't get her to eat anything. She had a temperature of 99.6. After I took Janet to the eye doctor (and, by the way, Janet has a cataract, for which she will have surgery Dec. 11), I took her to work, and then brought Hannah back to Maryville to our pediatrician, who turned around and sent us back to Knoxville to Children's Hospital Emergency Room--ostensibly for tests to make sure Hannah did not have pneumonia.

They did all kinds of tests on her, including a spinal tap to check for meningitis (which came back negative). To make that long story short, the only positive they got back was for RSV.

I'd never heard of it. Apparently, they've figured out about it since my next youngest got too old to get it badly (while older people can still get it, it just causes a bad cold; it's much more serious for infants). It stands for Respiratory Syncytial Virus, "the most common cause of lower respiratory tract infections in children worldwide," according to the RSV Info Center. They say that virtually all children contract it by the age of three, and call it "the leading cause of pneumonia and bronchiolitis in infants." The nurses tell me it's probably always been around, but they've only been able to identify it in the last 10 years or so.

Getting this on top of Hannah's existing low weight gain problems made it particularly dangerous.

So she went from the ER into the hospital.

Because she hadn't been eating, they put an IV in her head. Evidently she had gotten seriously dehydrated, since her weight went from 12 lbs. 2 oz. at check-in to 12 lbs. 12 oz. that night. She continued not eating (the first thing they do when they have trouble breathing is quit eating), so they put a nasogastric tube into her to give her formula whether she wanted it or not.

We had learned from our previous hospital stay (the Ph Probe in October) that someone had to stay with her 24 hours a day. Both of us were there most of the time. We would leave to do what we had to work-wise and then come back.

We had the room to ourselves until about 2:30 in the morning on the 15th, when they had to move another patient in. His name was Darrell and we joked that it was now the "celebrity suite" as they even had the names on the door in the correct order to read "Darrell Hannah." When they moved Darrell in, Donn moved to the fold-out chair/bed and Janet slept in the crib with Hannah. Darrell was only there that night, so Saturday night we again had the room to ourselves and were able to spread out a bit. Sunday evening they told us that we could either get a roommate then or wait and maybe get one in the middle of the night. We opted to let them move one in then. Suffice it to say it was an eye-opening experience. Our last roommate was only there overnight and was probably the best of the bunch. On the last few days we gave in and swapped nights at the hospital.

The worst time was 5:30 Tuesday morning. She had to go back down to the ER for a doctor there to check her out, because she was having trouble breathing. They started her on breathing treatments every four hours and they seemed to really make a difference. They also put her on oxygen for awhile, first trying the cute little "bunny nose" mask, then going to the more traditional nose piece when the "bunny" kept hopping around her face from her moving around. Tape can only do so much! Pretty soon she was feeling good enough to fuss at the nurses when they took her blood pressure and temperature.

	(Clockwise from top right) The celebrity suite. We thought Hannah's tape jobs made her look like she had a hair ribbon (that was for her IV) and also like she was getting a granny wax job for her upper lip. The "bunny nose" oxygen mask is probably a hit with older kids, but it just bored Hannah (or ticked her off. Plus they had it on upside down here!) With her IV out and the oxygen removed, she has more moments of peaceful repose (only the feeding tube is still in for this picture). She had lots of help from lots of machines.

She is home now, and almost back to normal. We did win the battle of the microlipids, so they started her on those, adding them to her formula while she was in the hospital. We feared they would leave the NG tube in because of her weight issues, but they decided that the weight issues were really separate from the RSV, and that we had been wrestling with that anyway, so they removed it so that our pediatrician could try some other stuff. They can always put it back in if they need to--and we very much hope they don't need to. She had reached a high of 12 pounds, 12 ounces in the hospital (a lot of which was fluid) but was only 12 pounds, 8 ounces when discharged.

Hannah will go see the pediatrician on Monday or Tuesday so we can pick up where we left off. We hope she will also start back to PT on Friday. Meanwhile, Janet and I will struggle with making up for having lost 10 days out of our generally hectic life. For some reason, the rest of the world still expected us to do things like pay bills and get things graded.