Nebulizer

Jacob was hospitalized a few week ago with his fourth pneumonia infection and this past Wednesday he finished his antibiotics. By Friday, he was coughing again and his chest was becoming junkier and junkier. He had a low-grade fever which we have been able to manage with a dose or two of ibuprofen each day and he has been on breathing treatments every four hours day and night. On Friday we had his pediatrician refer him to a pulmonary specialist at Hasbro. We saw a specialist in Boston prior to Jacob's surgery but I was disappointed to learn that he had no experience with or knowledge of how prenatal stroke and hemiparesis may have affected Jacob's respiratory system. The environment may be a catalyst given that Jacob remained healthy when he was quarantined at home with me for the six weeks following his first pneumonia until his surgery. And while in Boston, he was intubated and extubated and intubated and extubated and I was deathly afraid that he would have pneumonia because his chest was junky but he remained healthy for the four weeks he was home with me after surgery. He has been exposed to other children with respiratory infections - the cold. His brother along with every other child at daycare or in public has coughed all over him. But what makes him so susceptible to developing pneumonia while all the other children get a raspy voice and a snotty nose? Part of me wonders if it is related to the actual treatment he has been given for pneumonia. It must be bacterial because he improves every time with antibiotics. But if the bacteria are not eradicated, then when he finishes his antibiotics, the pneumonia returns. An X-ray cannot show whether a pneumonia infection is the same as the last or a new one and to suggest that it is the same means that the hospital and the doctors were ineffective. When Jacob was healthy, he had been treated at Hasbro. So if Jacob is unable to fight this on his own, Hasbro ER is where we will go.