Brief Illness & Eye Infection

James was hit with a bit of a double whammy…some sort of illness as well as an eye infection. The eye infection started first so let’s start there. A few weeks ago, his right eye was bloodshot. After about a week of using over the counter eye drops it wasn’t going away. Stacy took him to the eye doctor last week to have it looked at. The doc thought that some sort of element irritant got into the eye and was causing a bacterial infection. She prescribed antibiotic eye drops and disposable contact lenses to be used as a protective film for the eye. It was already starting to look better after the first day of treatment:

And then it got worse:

A lot of the problem is that James rarely closes his eyes and doesn’t blink. His eyes are open all the time, even when he sleeps. Because James doesn’t know how to swallow and manage his secretions, he sleeps on his belly in order to drain those secretions, so we put a blanket under his head to help absorb those secretions while he sleeps. If he happens to shift his head a little bit in his sleep, he is then rubbing his open eye across the blanket. I guess it is possible that if there happens to be dust or some other irritant on the blanket, it winds up in his eye. And because he doesn’t blink, that irritant doesn’t get flushed out of his eye. We’ll have to think about this and see if we can figure out a better solution.

It took about a week of using the antibiotic eye drops and contact lenses, but it looks like the infection is finally gone:

Now that the infection is gone, the eye doctor recommended we either get James protective contact lenses or glasses/goggles to help keep airborne irritants out of his eyes. We’re going to try both options, but we may have better luck with the glasses. The contact lenses that we had been using kept falling out. The glasses have been ordered and should be ready by next week. Because these are just to protect the eyes and not to help him see, they won’t have prescription lenses. We opted to go with transition lenses so that they will act as sunglasses when he is out in the sun.

In addition to the eye infection, James also had some other illness going on. Stacy got a call from the school on Thursday the 2nd to come pick up James. He had a high heart rate with low 02 saturations. Stacy remembered that he was sick around this time last year, so she looked at his medical binder. Sure enough, there was an entry for October 6th, 2013:

“Started to get really juicy nasal and oral. Sats were as low as 76 and as high as 92. Put on O2 overnight.”

The following day (October 7th, 2013) he still wasn’t doing well so Stacy called the pediatrician who recommended we go to the ER for a chest x-ray. The x-ray showed pneumonia in the upper lobe of the right lung and James spent the next couple of days in the hospital.

Stacy went back further in the binder and found that on October 1st, 2012:

“James started to get really juicy from his mouth and nose…clear liquids.”

For that 2012 episode, the pediatrician put him on antibiotics and fortunately, he avoided the hospital, although he did wind up in the hospital a month later with pneumonia.

Is this a new trend that James is starting? Getting sick the first week of October? Fortunately, this time around did not require a trip to the ER or a stay in the hospital. The pediatrician started him on a round of antibiotics and his numbers were back to normal the next day:

Maybe he just needed a day to stay home from school and relax. We kept him home the remainder of last week and sent him back on Monday. He seems to be doing just fine. Crazy kid always keeping mommy and daddy on their toes!

School

James had picture day a couple of weeks ago and this is what he wore. Note that his shirt was buttoned up for the picture. I thought it looked cool unbuttoned like that, but Stacy said no.

We just had parent/teacher conferences this past Thursday and they say that James is doing good. It just stinks that we can’t see videos of what he’s doing, but his one-on-one nurse gives Stacy the rundown after school of everything he did.

In the conference, the one thing that they did note was that James has these little twitches in his arms. We’ve noticed it at home, too. We just don’t know what they are or what is causing them, so we are unsure of which doc to talk to. I guess we’ll ask some of his doctors at future appointments to see if they know of anything we can do about them. He is not showing any signs of pain or discomfort when he twitches so we are not overly concerned with them at this point in time.

Other Randomness

Last night Stacy and I went out to celebrate our 10-year wedding anniversary. Our anniversary was actually about a month ago, but life got in the way a little bit. We went to a newer restaurant that lots of people were raving about, so we made a reservation just in case it was busy. When we got there it was busy, but not line-out-the-door busy, thankfully, because they didn’t have our reservation! Fortunately, the wait wasn’t too long, and they comped our dessert.

Does anybody else beside me get excited or amazed by the littlest things? For those of you that don’t know, James is tube fed and he has a g-tube button in/on his stomach. This button needs to be replaced every so often. Stacy put a new one in last week, and the damn thing glows in the dark! The extension glows, too! James doesn’t have feeds in the middle of the night anymore, but this would have been super useful a couple of years ago when he did.