Sunday... a pain in the ear!

This morning I checked Cole's ears with an otoscope. Yes, I have an otoscope... the thing that the doctor uses to look in your ears. He had been coughing last night and I wanted to see if his ears were bothering him too.  Cole's ears looked fine but since I had it out I figured I would check Kaitlyn's too just for the heck of it.

This is Cole's latest antic... "I'm king of the world!! (Titanic-style)

Good thing I did cause her left ear canal was almost swollen shut! I called hospice and with my description of what I could see, they decided to start her on an antibiotic.

I feel so bad for her. Who knows how long her ear has been bothering her. With a neurological degenerative disease such as NPA, as the disease progresses it gets more and more difficult for Kaitlyn to communicate to us when something is wrong.

I have been trying to keep her upright in her chair to see if that helps the swelling go down but she hasn't been too happy about that. If we lay her on her right side, her oxygen concentration goes down, probably due to the large size of her spleen and liver pressing on other organs, like the lungs and blood vessels. So we have her on her left side a lot, which is the side that is swollen. I'm sure laying on that side a lot has contributed to the swelling. We are trying some Benadryl to see if that will help get rid of some of that fluid and some morphine for the pain. I can't imagine how bad that must feel. My ears hurt just thinking about it! 

Hopefully she will start to feel better soon. We are still going to try and have a fun day at home though. Maybe we will paint her toe nails since she's never had that done before. :-) Sounds like fun to me!