The one with a Penny, Part 1.

This little thing. Who knew it could case so much drama and sleep deprivation? It started it all. 

We put Luca to bed at his normal bedtime, went down and watched once upon a time and came back up to check on him. He had been a bum and not gone to sleep and yelled at us for a bit before falling asleep. 

We always go in and check on him before we go to bed, to make sure he is covered and no limbs are sticking out of his bars--that has been the case far too often. 

Jose went in this night and came to get me to show me this. 

Blood. From what we didn't know. He has, as I've said not been feeling well at all the past week, and we thought it was just his sinus infection his pediatrician said he had. 

So worried that he coughed it up, but hopeful he just had a bloody nose or something we woke him up to check. You can imagine his delight. 

We couldn't see anything in his nose, but there was blood smeared across his cheeks like he rubbed his face in it. The only thing we could think of was that he coughed it up. 

Jose called the ER by us and asked what they thought, they said he was probably fine and it was up to us if we wanted to bring him in. 

By this time it was 9:45pm. I didn't want to go anywhere. So we were still on the fence trying to decide what to do. Luca was happily playing and all over the place again, not the least bit tired. 

We decided to just wait till morning, and I would take him to his doctor. So I called their office to leave a message, and heard the option to "speak to the on call doctor" but didn't want to be that annoying person that called late on a Sunday night for something that wasn't an emergency, so I just left a message. 

As I was leaving the message at the office I just kept getting the thought back to call the on call doctor. I brushed it off a few times again, really not wanting to be annoying. I hung up after leaving the message and did a few things and just kept thinking I needed to call that on call Dr. 

So I finally did. I called him, and when he called me back I explained everything that had been going on in the last week. The first thing he said to me was, "I'm more worried about something other than the blood, I'm worried something is lodged in his throat, like a coin or a small toy." That made me feel like an awesome mom. 

He told us to take him into the ER by the next morning at the very latest to be xrayed, so we just left then and headed to our nearest ER. If I had been thinking I would have asked which hospital to go to, and we would have cut out this middle man between primary childrens hospital and this one in bountiful. 

We got to Lakeview hospital, with grandpa in tow and waited for quite a while. The doctor finally came in, and I explained why we were there, and he laughed at me. He totally didn't believe me, and went on to say he wanted to do some breathing treatments because he thought that was all it was. 

A sweet nurse came in to do the first set of vitals of the next 16 hours. Luca was fine for them, but never again. 

 

He watched her hook everything up and watched the lights. 

After she did the vitals we waited for the X-ray tech to come. It felt so long while we were there, but looking back it was super quick compared to what we did at primary's. 

Jose blew up a glove to entertain Luca--while we waited. But he did not appreciate that. He just pushed it away over and over again. 

Then the X-ray tech got there--and Luca had his first melt down of the night. They had to hold him down, and his arms to get it done. 

Then another nurse brought in a breathing treatment/torture treatment. Second meltdown commenced. Again we had to hold him down and hold the mask over his face so he would breath it all in. Of course doing nothing for him except ticking him off. 

After we finished with that, and calmed Luca down, who at this point is just crying from exhaustion we waited some more. 

The nurse and doctor finally came back from waiting for the X-rays--laughed and told me to get my camera ready because I would want a picture of them. 

 

Sure enough. Just like the on call doctor said, there was a coin stuck in his eating tube. They guessed by the size that it was a nickel. But they aren't children specialists so we let that go. Of course as we would later find out, it's always a penny. And it surely was. 

We could only guess as to when he swallowed the thing based on the other symptoms--not being able to keep any solids down, and a painful cough. We pegged it for the Saturday before last. 8 days my poor child had a penny in his throat. 

They told us we needed to go to primary childrens hospital so they could sedate him and remove it. So they called them to figure out when we should go. They said to go right then so they could get it done and we wouldn't have to worry about being pushed aside when it got busy in the morning. 

So we dropped grandpa back off at home and headed to Primary's. 

Only anticipating it would be a few more hours and we could go home we had nothing with us, no phone chargers, no clothes nothing. Little did we know we still had over 12 hours at the hospital of fun.