Discharge from Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital

Today, Richard show some marked improvements. We are keeping up his Chest PT every 4 hours. Overnight he was on 12 liters per minutes of oxygen. We moved to room 701, it was slightly larger and right next to the entrance. The best part is we had a nice view of Mt. Rainer from our window.

We were able to get is oxygen needs down to 2 liters per minute today. That means that this afternoon we switched to low-flow oxygen and discharged to the floor. We moved to room 713.

The night was quiet and uneventful from Richard’s standpoint. The hard part of the night was Mary Bridge was down to only 2 Respiratory Therapists (RT) for the entire building, when they normally have 5. This meant Sky, our RT was stuck in the ER all night and papa got to get up every 4 hours and do Richard’s Chest PT. We are happy to step up and help the community around us in the hospital, but it leaves papa with very little quality sleep.

One of the little things most people do not know, is that we carry with us low-flow oxygen, pulse ox and limited heart monitor, medical suction, chest PT equipment, nebuliser and a small pharmacy worth of respiratory medications. Between that and the wound care supplies we have for Richard, we have a hospital room on wheels for Richard. All we are missing is the medical staff. We carry this because Richard has a habit of getting him inpatient secondary infections; such as norovirus, Covid-19, RSV and others. This equipment and our training allows us to remain at home when most other kids would need to go to the hospital and get discharged a couple days before most.

The nice thing about him proving for over 24 hours he can be on low-flow oxygen is that he has now achieved the threshold that we can be discarded and we can be sent home.