Lara 20/20 vision, gender prediction and a perfect nursery

Lara is fine at the moment, not showing any ill effects from her bang on the nose. She has a bit of a cough and a cold, but hey, that's normal for our house at the moment, I'm surprised we're not giving the dogs Lemsip.
She seems to fully grasp the concept of Olga and Junior, if not the timescales involved. We got a great kid's book from the library this weekend, called "There's a house inside my mummy", which we read to her every night. Last night when Olga was reading it to her, it led Lara to put her eye to Olga's belly button "to look at the baby", and she went on to announce that it's a girl.
Her eyesight is amazingly good. This morning she spotted one of her nursery workers walking to the nursery, and from fully 200 metres away she was confident in saying "That's Bianca over there".
Whilst I'm mentioning it, it should be noted that our nursery, the Cressex Day Nursery, has just had its Ofsted assessment back, and it achieved Outstanding in all 17 categories that it was assessed on. Now that is something to be proud of.

On the mend

Olga is getting better, slowly. After she came home on Wednesday, she had her antibiotics and two inhalers, and they seemed to be helping with her breathing, and her cough - whilst still very irritating for her - was at least doing what it was supposed to be doing, and dislodging the gunk in her lungs. However, weeks of heavy coughing had taken its toll, and she had a bad stabbing pain in her ribs, and worried that it might be a clot developing, and at least wanting to report it, she headed back to the GP on Thursday.
He checked her over properly, unlike his two previous colleagues (one of whom had listened to her breathing with his stethoscope through two layers of Olga's clothing!), and reckoned that it was a muscle strain. Ibuprofen would have been the normal solution, but of course Olga can't have that, so it was back to the paracetamol, and let the antibiotics do their job. After a bit of internet-diagnosing, we wondered if it might be pleurisy, but even if it was, the solution to that is to treat the underlying cause of it, which is the chest infection.
So, each night Olga's been able to get better and better quality of sleep, taking a puff on her inhaler if she wakes up coughing in the night, and tomorrow she finishes her course of antibiotics. She went to see the GP today so he could see if she needed another course prescribing, but she doesn't. Her cough will linger on for a few more weeks yet, most likely, but the infection will be gone, and hopefully she'll be able to get a full night's sleep.
All focus switches now to the 20-week scan for Junior next Friday. Two possible side-effects of pneumonia in pregnancy are low birth weight and premature birth. Well, Lara had both of those and she's strong as an ox and twice as stubborn! I will feel better once we've had the scan and know more about Junior's progress.

Home now, and the diagnosis is in....

Olga's back at home, as of 3pm today. Her discharge sheet from the hospital states Community-Acquired Pneumonia (CAP) as the diagnosis of her illness, so at least we can put a name to it now. She's got 2 inhalers and bottles of pills galore to take, and won't be running any marathons in the near future.

One more night away

Olga's having one more night in hospital tonight. She's been given 2 inhalers to use, and been given some breathing exercises to do by the physio, although when she did part of them this morning when I was there, the result was her coughing worsened for 45 minutes. I suspect that is what is supposed to happen though, it's supposed to get the gunk in her lungs moving. She's still on antibiotics, but came off the oxygen this afternoon, and still has blood-thinning injections once a day, to combat any clot. So, she should be home tomorrow, which will be great, but more than anything I want her to have a good night's sleep without coughing.
I remembered to take a photo of Nurse Lara tonight, before we were ejected from the ward due to their No Kids rule. Something to do with avoiding infections, whether they're worried about the kids taking something in or taking something away wasn't clear! We hadn't been told this rule, communications between staff and family could be better - some nurses on the ward today weren't even sure what time evening visitor hours were... Anyway, there's nurse Lara giving Mama an injection and checking her temperature.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.9

Nurse Lara visits the patient

Olga is staying another night in hospital tonight. Her temperature has stabilized today, thanks to the antibiotics, but her cough is just as bad, and her breathing isn't much better, and so she's been on oxygen all day. I went to see her for a few hours this morning, then Lara and I went to visit her after tea tonight, and we thought it would be cute if Lara wore her nurse outfit, and took her Doctor's bag with her. It's actually her Vet's bag, but the equipment she carries in there is good for humans and dogs! She checked Mama's temperature, gave her some medicine, gave her an injection, looked in her ears, rubbed some cream in, brushed her hair and trimmed her nails (all pretend of course, apart from the hair brushing!) The real nurses loved it!
The word from the Doc is that there's a good chance Olga will come home tomorrow, but we'll have to wait and see how she is in the morning. I only thought of taking a photo once we were in the lift on the way down from the ward, which is a shame..

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.9