We just spent 2 hours at the doctor's office this afternoon/early evening. Two weeks ago we finally got in to see the allergist. We drove 1 hour and 20 minutes each way to go to the main Military Hospital in Europe, the only facility within the military that has an allergist. It was a waste of time. They couldn't do the same kind of testing we needed. The Army dropped the ball in scanning in our medical records and out of a stack of probably 30 pages only scanned in 2! We should have brought our records with us but we believed the correspondence office when they said our records from the States would be in the system. The doctor would only do a prick test for foods we thought he may be allergic too. Considering he doesn't have the typical reaction to food that people with a food allergy have (swelling, rash, etc.) we were not sure. We had them check for the three things he's had that he's thrown-up after eating: oranges, pineapples, and milk. He didn't show an allergy to any of that. So we're most likely going to have to go to a German allergist if we want to find out what his allergies are, which is something I didn't want to do. I really prefer Caden's medical records to be in English. Also German healthcare is a little different than U.S.
Yesterday we took him to get his blood levels checked to confirm the iron is working. Before anything was done we asked the lab tech to look at the request to make sure they would test for what we needed - a CBC (complete blood count), because we need to make sure his iron supplements are working. The lady assured us that they would do a complete test. Well, today I found out they didn't. Thank you, Army. I hate having to put my child through excessive testing.
Also, when I called to find out the results of the iron test over the phone, the nurse kept stalling. He finally said something didn't look right, not his hemoglobin levels but his white blood cells. He said he was trying to get the doctor but she was busy with patients. He said it looked like he may have a virus or bacterial infection. I told him that two days ago when we were at the park, a kid started coughing right in Caden's face. What does Caden do? He gets right up in the kids face and laughs, thinking it was funny. I asked my neighbors daughter to pull him away, she was with us, and to take him to play away from the coughing child. So I thought maybe Caden had a cold. He is congested and has a runny nose but doesn't have a fever. The nurse said we'll see if he could get us an appointment. Sadly, we can only get an appointment for the day we call in and we can't call in before 10am. It's because of our status in Germany. Well, praise God we got in! I called around 1:30pm and there was a 3:30pm opening.
What we found out is that Caden had to get a nebulizer (breathing treatment) and the doctor thought he may need two breathing treatments (which he hated!) and a shot. What?! He was wheezing really bad and she said it's stuff like this that puts kids in the hospital. Seriously?! What kind of mother am I? I thought he just had a cold. I'm so glad we got an appointment. Thankfully he only had to have one treatment. He had this treatment last year one time when he was sick and not breathing well after we had gone to the German pediatrician and the German ER and got no help. She also prescribed an inhaler for him. She said if he wakes up coughing at night to give him a treatment every four hours. They can't tell us if he has asthma or what's causing this. They said it could be the weather, an allergy to something, a virus, really anything. They told us we need to come in tomorrow and get his lungs checked out. Please say a prayer for him. He has had a really rough time lately.
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