Surprise Vacatoin Hospitalization

I guess I need to start at the beginning on this one.  Last Monday, before we went out of town, Cooper missed a day of school for having a random fever with a cough.  It was gone after an hour and he seemed fine, so he went to school the next day and then had surgery (tubes put in his ears) on Wednesday as planned.  After surgery, his lungs are always pretty crappy.  So we had him on oxygen at night.  When we went out of town on Sunday, we brought our oxygen compressor so we could continue to give him oxygen at night, but nothing else.  He still had a bit of a lingering cough, but nothing that seemed too concerning.  Tuesday night, we went to NIOSA with friends.  Ritt's mom stayed with Cooper.  RIGTH before we got home, he threw up a lot.  He must have aspirated because by the time we got home, he was breathing so loudly that we though he was awake.  We immediately put him on a bunch of oxygen because he was looking a little grey and was grunting.  It helped some, but we couldn't get him to wake up and he had a fever of 102.8.  So we took him to the nearest ER.  They were great.  As soon as we got there and told them that he needed to be on oxygen, we went straight back to triage.  The tech hooked him up to a pulse ox, and his sats were in the mid-70's.  Really not good.  The triage nurse came in, saw his level, and rushed us to a room where oxygen and many doctors and nurses were waiting for us.  They had the x-ray machine in there before I could put my stuff down and his right lower lung looked bad.  Then they got some bloodwork on him (not an easy thing on Cooper's fat arms and legs).  His white blood cell count was over 30,000, so he obviosuly had an infection.  Unfortunately, the hospital where we were didn't admit children, so at 3:30 in the morning Cooper was transferred downtown to Christus Santa Rosa. 

Luckily, Brad went to medical school there and is a pediatrician, so our stay was much better than it otherwise might have been.  They let us go home after 24 hours of no fever, they put us on an antibiotic that didn't cost us an arm and a leg, since our prescription insurance didn't extend to Texas, and, most importantly, they found a company who let us borrow 2 oxygen tanks FOR FREE to get us back to Little Rock on oxygen.  Seriously, it was amazing.  I will say this, though: I missed ACH.  I missed knowing most of the doctors and nurses, I missed 20% off in the cafeteria (and knowing where the cafeteria was), etc.  Also, ACH is a MUCH nicer hospital, even though Christus is private.  So now we are in Houston.  Cooper is pretty much back to his normal, happy self.  He is bouncing, eating solid food, and breathing better.  Once we get home to a pulse ox tomorrow, we will see how he does off of oxygen, but until then, I'm not chancing anything.  More later on the happier parts of our vacation week.