1,336 days

It has been 1,336 days since Gracie was admitted to the hospital, 1923840 minutes since Gracie was admitted, four birthdays, three Christmases, four Easters, three Thanksgivings, three New Years, one trip to Florida, two trips to Indianapolis to see Uncle Nick play soccer, one trip to the Kalahari, one trip to the Great Wolf Lodge, countless trips to the Zoo and other nearby activities, but who is counting?!

ME. I am. Her momma. Her Biggest fan. Her Biggest supporter!

That all changed on Saturday, November 23rd, 2024, when reality emerged from the cold air and slapped us across the face. I took Gracie to urgent care for her breathing. At this point, she had been sick for a good week, and with her being in school, this was pretty common for her and her sister. However, what tipped me off was her labored breathing, which looked like she was struggling a bit more than normal.

I made an appointment at a Children's urgent care 45 minutes away, and off we went. Once we arrived, we waited a while to get a room. Once in our room, they took all of the normal vitals, asked questions most doctor's offices ask, and then proceeded to grab Gracie's oxygen saturation, which was in the lower 90s. Normal oxygen sats are 97+ so this was alarming but also not surprising as she is not only a heart kiddo but also sick. The craziest part about these heart kids is they tend to show no actual symptoms of difficulties so it can be very deceiving. Luckily this heart kiddos momma knows her VERY well!

They proceeded to give her two breathing treatments to help with her O2 sats but unfortunately, this ended up dropping her in the 80's for Oxygen. We ended up getting an X-ray of her lungs in which I was not able to stay with her in the room because I was 40 weeks pregnant!

The results came in and Grace had Pneumonia in the right lobe of her lungs. Due to her sats not coming back up into the 90's we automatically granted ourselves admission to the hospital. We were transferred to Children's via ambulance where Grace was a VERY unhappy little girl and her heart rate was in the high 150's which was way above her baseline of 60's. Gracie was on 8L of oxygen which is pretty high!

Once we made it to the emergency room of Children's they told us that they thought they had a room for us. I asked them to take us to the cardiac unit or the cardiac step-down unit but they instead took us to the primary care unit. I think the mom in me just knew we needed to be on the unit and spoiler alert WE DID!

Once on the primary care floor (floor 9) we settled in, got her vitals again, made sure her oxygen mask was comfortably on her face, and let her rest. By now it was past 10 PM and this poor girl was exhausted. Grandma rushed over to stay with her twin sister Paisley and Dad came to bring the essentials needed for spending the night in the hospital (or what we thought would be only one night).

The next morning we met with the primary care doctor on call that day and she went over how she was concerned about how high Gracies heart rate was. Grace continued to need oxygen support but we were working on weaning her off it. This floor was not like the cardiac ICU. The docs and nurses didn't seem to be able to "read the room". Gracie was not in the mood to talk about her favorite color or animal, she wanted to be left alone so I got to the point of saying "Get what you need to get done and basically get the F OUT!".

Gracie was not drinking enough so therefore they wanted to put in an IV to get fluids into her to see if that would help with her high heart rate. At this point, they had already consulted Cardiology and I of course had texted her Cardiologist. Her cardiologist did not seem too concerned considering Grace was sick and it was not out of the norm to have a higher heart rate due to sickness. However, she was not the acting Cardiologist on so she did not review the EKG that was performed that day so she did not have ALL the information necessary to make that decision. (She apologized later!)

So here we were... two days away from my induction date with baby #3, and Gracie was admitted to the hospital. What. the. actual. fuck.