The "Bust" of a Sleep Study

Play song, "Dog Days Are Over" with this post

We have had our fair share of sleep studies... which yes, are inaccurately named since no one gets any sleep! 

This one by far was the worst though. I'll try and make this short, but you know me ;) 

I guess it started with a call from Em's babysitter right as I was leaving work that day, saying that Em had been having some significant allergy symptoms, and she wanted to make me aware in case it was going to interfere with the sleep study that night. I thanked her for telling me, but thought that giving her a dose of benadryl before we left would suffice. We also had a physical therapy appointment at 5 and then Steve's sister Amber was coming from West Virginia that day. We packed a lot in before we headed to Salt Lake for our 8 pm check-in time, and honestly Em was still a little "hazy" but seemed ok. 

However, as they began to hook her up, she was getting a little worse again, so I gave her one more dose of benadryl, which would bring her total to 3 tsp in about a 3 hour period (most she's ever had).... didn't seem to work, so I gave her her evening dose of Flonase, and then the sleep tech and I suctioned her out and they commenced hooking her up, and oh my gosh she was so exhausted! 

 this was taken before they started

And here's after she was all ready to go (and how anyone can be expected to sleep like this, is beyond me!)

She was asleep within no time and it had been a long week, so I went right to sleep as well. Too bad that was pretty short lived! I was first woken up by the techs coming in about every 5 minutes and talking about what they could do to get a reading.... I knew that things weren't going well and though we've never been sent home before, I know it is a possibility when they can't get a good reading. After they left the room for the umpteenth time, Em started to stir and seemed pretty uncomfortable, so I went over to her and that's when she began vomiting. The tech then came running back in since they saw what happened on the camera, and once the light was on, we saw how swollen she was looking. 

At that point, it was pretty certain that the sleep study was a bust, so we went ahead and pulled all that "stuff" off of Em and changed her clothes. The tech was not comfortable with us driving home without having her checked out by a doctor.... and since it was the middle of the night, the only way to do that was to go through the ER. So we were escorted there with all of our stuff (if you don't know, we need to take a lot of things for this little girl of ours... even for one night!). Amazingly the waiting room was completely empty (have to admit that I've never seen that in all of Em's life!)! So we were able to go straight back, and amazingly Em was doing quite a bit better by the time we were in a room. The doctor didn't see it necessary to do any epinephrin, so she was given some more benadryl, prednisone and zofran, and then a script for more of each of these, and we drove home at 3 am.... one of the longest nights of my life! And really I'm hoping this will be the last time we're in the hospital for allergies! Seriously, this family has seen enough of that! On top of everything else we deal with! 

So after all that, we will have to endure yet another sleep study since they didn't get anything at all from this one. Fun life we lead! Haha, what ya gonna do though?