Horrible Week!

It has been a nightmare of a week. Ashton started getting sick a week ago on Wednesday, and he ran a fever from Wednesday thru Sunday. I took both him and Emily to the doctor on Thursday of that week hoping they had not come down with the flu. They swabbed Ashton for the flu, and it came up negative, and as Emily's lungs sounded so bad, they did an x-ray of her chest which was also negative. I took them home without so much as a cough medicine prescription for either. Then Braylon started sounding bad, but Ashton and Emily slowly improved. By Monday, Braylon was needing more oxygen than his sister, so back to the doctor we went. He was diagnosed with a sinus infection, but not the flu, so he was started on antibiotics. I was also told that it was okay to send Ashton back to school at that point. Ashton returned to school on Tuesday, but as the day progressed, Braylon started struggling more and more to breathe. Emily still sounded bad, but she was handling it well for her. Ashton got home from school and he was feeling kind of tired but insisted that he wanted to go out to the college for an after school party he had been invited to, so I relented. Denny drove him out there while I was tending to the younger kids. About an hour and a half later, Denny and Ashton got home, and Ashton was in very bad shape. He just came in and flopped down, and Denny called out to me to come look at him. We could barely keep him awake, and we couldn't get him to answer questions very well. What we did get out of him was that he could not breathe, his chest hurt so bad he didn't want to breathe, and he was so tired that he wanted us to leave him alone. We had a horrible time keeping him awake more than ten seconds at a time. Braylon the baby was also struggling very badly, and I had actually been considering taking him to the ER, so when Ashton came in like this, we packed both Ashton and Braylon up and went to the the hospital. It turned out that they both had pneumonia most likely secondary to the H1N1 virus (even though they both tested negative), and Ashton had positive blood cultures as well. They both earned a night in the hospital, IV's, and high doses of antibiotics. Emily is slowly improving on her own, Ashton and Braylon are also now improving, and now Ryan has come down with a nasty cough but no other symptom as of right now. And then Friday night, Friday the 13th of course, I came down with a fever and the worst cough ever, and now I feel like I have been hit by a truck! Most definitely the flu! As I said, it has been a nightmare of a week!