Parental PTSD Part 753

So, I'm chatty today.  I've gotta get this out somehow.

So, um, yeah.  PTSD from a child's illness.  It's a thing.  It's nice to have some validation, but it's not a surprise to anyone who has had a child whose been in the hospital.

Here is where we are with that, based on yesterday's hospitalization.

1)  The beep of the pulse oximeter alarm. Ugh.  I forget about it until I hear it.  And because there are a lot of children in the peds ward with respiratory illnesses, I heard it almost as soon as we got there.  It's a punch in the stomach that I can do without.

2)  Fortunately, Bridget did not have any alarms go off, but the child beside of us did. And every time it went off, I could imagine the parent in there straining his/her head to look at the number on the alarm and praying that it stops, the number goes up, or the nurse to arrive and up the O2 level. It's not fun.

3)  As soon as we got home today, I went into vacuum cleaner mode, eating every piece of high fat and/or salty food I could find as well as wondering if 11:30 am is too early to open a bottle of wine and drink by myself.

The good news about this trip with Bridget is that what we are doing is working.  They did an X-ray and she did not have any atelectasis.  YAY!  She did have junk spread around her lungs but nothing like what happened in June.  So Yay!  Yay!  Yay!

An ever so slight boo in that I realized as we left that we don't know where we are in this virus's progression, and, thus, where we are in her mucus-y lungs:  beginning, middle, or end?  My vote, along the lines of Churchill:  "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Blergh.  At least Dave is home now and we can open up that wine.