Welcome to 2021. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I was ready to kiss 2020 goodbye. As you can see from the pic above, James wants to burn it to the ground and start over. Unfortunately, we can’t do that. We can’t just throw a match on it, or hit the delete key, or ask for a do over. About all we can do is look back and reflect.
My thoughts about 2020? It threw us all a bit of a curveball. Some of us got bruised and scarred. Some of us lost something that we can never get back. Some of us didn’t make it. If there is one thing that I’ve learned over the past year is that things can and will change in an instant, and we just can’t stop it. I’ve spent some time assessing where I am in my life and what I would like to change. I have already started carving out a path to make those changes. For 2021 I will continue on that path and see where it leads…one step at a time.
I’m not calling them resolutions because let’s face it, resolutions are doomed to fail. How many New Years resolutions have you made that you actually stuck with? I read a statistic somewhere, and I can’t remember the actual number, but I think it was something like only 25% of people who make resolutions stick with them after 30 days. And that number dwindles as the year goes on. That’s why I am not calling them resolutions. I don’t have a word for it. Goals? Aspirations? I don’t know. I just have some things I want to accomplish before I die. This past year has really shown me that we just don’t know when our time will be up. I need to buckle down and put in a little bit of time each and every day working towards those things. I don’t want to wake up one day in the afterlife with a lot of regrets.
James’ Health
I think that’s enough of looking back at the past and forward to the future. Let’s come back to the present, starting with James’ health. James has been having respiratory issues since the end of November. It’s not uncommon for him to get pneumonia around Thanksgiving, but this time it seemed different than it had in the past. The palliative nurse stopped by in early December and while he wasn’t moving air like he should, he didn’t have the signature sound of pneumonia. I haven’t heard it myself, but somebody told us once that when someone has pneumonia and you listen to their lungs, it sounds like crumpling up a piece of paper. The nurse didn’t hear that sound, so she didn’t think this was pneumonia.
The other thing that was different was that he needed different amounts of oxygen throughout the day to keep his sats up. If he was just in his Nap Nanny watching TV or in school, he we need 1 or 1.5 liters of oxygen. In the mornings after he gets up and before breakfast, he gets a percussion vest treatment. There have been times Stacy has had to crank the oxygen concentrator up to 3 liters during the morning vest treatment. During the night when he is in bed, he has these spells where his sats would drop and it didn’t seem to matter how much oxygen we gave him, his numbers just wouldn’t come up. After some suctioning, and repositioning, his numbers would finally come back up, but this was far from normal…even for James.
We didn’t take James to the ER because nobody thought this was pneumonia and we didn’t want to risk sending him to the ER for a chest x-ray and catching covid. We ruled out covid, too, because he didn’t have a fever which is one of the main symptoms. So, what the hell was it? We thought about any recent changes that could have brought this on.
We thought about any recent changes that could have brought this on. There weren’t any formula or med changes so that wasn’t it. He started the school year in a hybrid format (at school Monday and Tuesday, and virtual the rest of the week), and then went completely virtual on November 9th, which was almost three weeks before the respiratory issues started. The only other thing that changed was that we got Maggie in mid-October, about six weeks prior to the breathing issues.
The pediatrician recommended we get some bloodwork done to see if there was an allergy that was causing the respiratory issues. We waited almost a week for those results to come back, and we prayed every day that it wasn’t the dog. When the blood test results came back it showed slightly elevated dog, milk, and dust mites, along with a higher maple tree.
Well, we do have a maple tree in our back yard, and our next-door neighbor has one in her front yard, but those have been there for years. His formula has a little bit of milk in it, but again, he has been taking the same formula for years. Why would these all of a sudden be causing a problem? That left us with dust mites and the dog.
Stacy spoke with the pediatrician and none of us are convinced it is the dog. We’re not completely ruling it out, but Stacy’s brother has a dog and if James spends enough time at his house, he gets very gunky and has red, bloodshot eyes. He doesn’t have that with Maggie. The pediatrician recommended starting James on an allergy med and to make an appointment with an allergist to see what they think.
We had a virtual appointment with an allergist, and she is also not convinced it’s the dog, but did recommend trying a different allergy med than what the pediatrician recommended. Unfortunately, the one that the allergist recommended causes dryness, so we probably won’t use it. Having James too dry also causes him to have respiratory issues.
As far as the dust mites go, Stacy and I spent almost an entire weekend cleaning and vacuuming. We don’t have that big of a house, but James has a lot of stuff. There was a lot of moving stuff around, vacuuming and dusting, and then moving the stuff back. Believe it or not, we think the dust may have been the cause of his respiratory issues. About a week after we gave our house a good cleaning, James went almost an entire day without needing oxygen. That was about a week ago, and he still needs oxygen here and there, but he’s been needing it less and less every day.
He had been on oxygen for almost five weeks and you’re telling me that all we had to do was clean?! I guess now we’ll be doing it more often. Especially now that we have Maggie.
Christmas
Just like Thanksgiving, Christmas was pretty much cancelled. Every year our township’s Disability Services department hosts a Christmas party for disabled kids that live within the township. Although the party was cancelled this year, they did send Santa and Mrs. Claus to our house to drop off gifts for James.
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day it was just the four of us. We didn’t see any of our families, but we did call them to wish them a Merry Christmas.
That pic was taken before we opened gifts. Can you tell how excited we all were? James got some shirts (shocking, I know), an ornament, a movie, and a cool light show projector; Stacy got some cozy socks and some water bottles; Maggie got some yummy treats; and I got socks and gift cards.
Even though we couldn’t be with our families, we are thankful that everyone is remaining healthy. Now that there is a Covid-19 vaccine available, hopefully things will get better in 2021 and we’ll be able to get back to some sort of normalcy.