I hoped that our snowstorm misadventures were finished after abandoning my car by the side of the road and barely making it home on Friday night. Unfortunately, that was just the beginning.
Yesterday morning Tucker's fever had climbed to 103 but he was active and the doctor on call said that as long as we filled the prescriptions (antibiotic and prednisone to help his lungs) in the next day or so, we'd be okay. She did warn to watch his breathing, and that is what to be most concerned about. We hemmed and hawed about whether the roads were passable until the early afternoon when the snow lightened considerably. Austin packed emergency supplies in case he got stranded in his truck, and hit the road.
Our actual driveway and lane were plowed by our neighbor in his tractor, but the secondary road it feeds into was completely unplowed, 24 hours (and 25 inches!) into the storm.
Austin did make it through, following some tire tracks until he hit the main road. Barely. But, while Austin was getting to CVS, Tucker decided to get sick. REALLY sick, and fast.
One minute he was playing upstairs with me and his trucks and the next he was hot (103.6) and listless. His breathing started to get labored, and he proceeded to throw up all over both of us. I cleaned him up and gave him his inhaler and Tylenol. Unfortunately, even with his inhaler, his breathing got even worse still. He asked me to give him the inhaler again, but another dose was four hours away. He threw up two more times, his breathing degenerated further and then I found his temperature had spiked to 105.3! One-oh-FIVE.
That was when I called the ambulance.
It took the ambulance 25 minutes to get to our house (usually a five minute trip) because of the roads. By the time they arrived, things were already getting better. I had gotten his fever down some by sponging him with water, and his breathing was getting better as he was calming down. Tucker got a nebulizer and oxygen in the ambulance and the fever meds kicked in. By the time we got to the ER (an hour ride--usually 20 minutes), he had good color and was playful and happy. What an amazing relief.
Tucker does have pneumonia--a chest xray at the hospital confirmed that, but since he was doing so well was able to go home. I am SO thankful.
But that wasn't the end of our adventures. The second twist on the day was that our neighbors called us while we were getting ready to leave the ER, to tell us that they had lost power. We debated about whether we thought we'd be even able to get up the hill to our house, and how to manage no electricity and a toddler with pneumonia.
Things were a bit grim, but not as terrible as we expected. The unplowed road near our house had been improved significantly by a good samaritan who plowed a layer off the road. We made it home slowly but safely.
I find it ironic that our longest power outage ever (20 hours) happened the night we had a sick child with pneumonia. Austin got our wood stoves going and we managed to stay as warm upstairs as we usually do. We didn't need to worry about our food spoiling because our porch was our refrigerator, and our wood stove was our cooktop. It was not too bad, but Tucker was distraught that the bus video wasn't working and he couldn't play with the water from the faucet (our well pump is electric).
