Redundant

So, this afternoon (by now YESTERDAY afternoon!), after 24 hours of breathing treatments, Charlotte's breathing sounded pretty much the same.

Saturday, I asked the pediatrician if she should be better by Tuesday (her follow up) and he said, "hopefully she's better by tonight." I took that to mean NOT that she would be well by that evening, but that she should be better. As we were leaving, he said "I'm here until Monday morning at 5 am, so call me if you have any additional concerns." So concerned that she did not sound better after 24 hours, Fred and I decided to call the office to make sure we shouldn't worry yet. He left a message asking for him to call us.

Instead, a nurse calls. I tell her the WHOLE story, including that she sounds THE SAME (not better, not worse), she has normal coloring, eats fine, good spirits, etc. She asks to listen to Charlotte, tells me it sounds really bad and to give her another treatment and she will call back. She calls back after the treatment and says that she doesn't sound any better, we need to go to the emergency room.

Now, I never called expecting to go to the emergency room - I just had a question for the Dr. that I thought I was going to speak with. I try to give her my reasons that I don't really think she needs to go to the emergency room, but she keeps insisting. A phone call to Fiona confirms we should do what the nurse says, so I flip out, and off we run to the TCH emergency room, where we expose our already sick child to who knows what other germs in a waiting room overflowing with sick kiddos. When I learned that the wait could be around 6 hours, I told the registration lady that her breathing treatments were every 4 hours, and she needed one in three. If that hadn't called us back before then, we would have come home. No way was I going to sit around that long NOT tending to my child's illness while waiting for someone there to do something.

Three hours later we leave the hospital with the same instructions as from the pediatrician and finally an answer to my original question - it could be a few days before her breathing sounds better. Thats all I needed to know!

There has got to be an easier way to get the information I need instead of running off in a panic to the ER.

SHEEZ!

On the other hand, if something ever happened to Charlotte because of my failure to act, I could never live with myself.