Jaden has had a fairly plugged nose since two weeks after birth. Over the course of the last two weeks he's run the occasional, low fever. The walk-in clinic (our doctor wasn't in that day) prescribed him antibiotics; they didn't work. Two days ago, my wife takes him to the doctor and receives a requisition for a chest x-ray. Yesterday morning he gets the x-ray (a traumatic experience for our little one) and we receive a call from our doctor later that day.
"He has a bronchial infection, if his condition gets worse, take him to emergency".
His condition got worse, so we did just that.
It was a quiet night, in fact when we arrived, we were the only ones in the waiting room. But despite this, the triage nurse was quick to give us the classic "your baby sure looks fine to me" line. Everyone knows that the moment you want a doctor to check you out, your symptoms hide around the corner, right?
I knew from that moment that we were just wasting our time. I hate being right about that sort of thing. After checking his heart rate three times, they checked his blood/oxygen level. Tell me if this next part makes any sense to you:
They confirmed that his oxygen level is at 99%, which apparently is great. Then they proceeded to give him an oxygen mask with some medicine (essentially a "puffer") and said "we'll be back in ten minutes." After this, they hooked him up to an all-too-familiar mechanism....
"Excuse me", I asked, after Jaden's mask had been removed and us sitting around for ten minutes. "Should we be waiting here, or are we free to go?"
"No, they're just waiting to get some pending test results back, but his blood/oxygen levels are now showing at 99%, so he should be fine." There ended up being no more test results, that was all they were checking.
So, let me get this straight, we spent two hours going from "his oxygen levels are great" to "let's give him oxygen" to "his oxygen levels are great, our work is done here."
Ladies and gentlemen....the Placebo Effect.
Fortunately, purely based on the doctor examining Jaden's breathing, he prescribed us a four-day puffer for Jaden. I still don't know what this puffer is going to accomplish other than make it easier for him to cope for a brief period.
I was tempted to ask "can we just check his oxygen levels one more time?" But sarcasm gets you nowhere in life, so I just had an inward chuckle.
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