Scary stuff

Well, now that we are on the mend, I have some time to write about last week. Samuel started getting a runny nose on Wednesday morning. Which turned into wheezing by Wednesday afternoon. I took him to an urgent care doctor Wednesday night because of the wheezing and he had eye junk. They gave him a nebulizer/albuterol treatment and said his lungs sounded better afterwards. They also "checked" his oxygen levels. It's hard to do on little fingers with a device made for adult fingers. Anyway, as soon as she checked it, the nurse called in a semi-frantic voice for the doctor. This scared me. His original reading was 78%, which I don't believe because he wasn't blue or anything. But after his nebulizer treatment, it was up to mid-90s if you go by the same device. The doctor gave us a prescription for albuterol and a nebulizer to rent and said to give him a treatment every 3 hours or so and come back the next day.

So Wednesday night I gave him a treatment every 3 hours and neither of us slept very well. The treatments didn't really seem to help, but since I didn't know what else to do, I kept giving him the albuterol. He also had a barking cough...

Thursday morning I took him in again to the urgent care clinic and said that the treatments haven't been helping. They checked him, did another albuterol treatment and the doctor told me he had bronchitis and wrote him a prescription for oral steroids. I'm not a big fan of steroids after having taken them for my throat, but if it would help him breathe better, then I'd do it. Samuel was still wheezing a lot and coughing and pale but he really was still happy.

Thursday night he slept in a bouncy seat next to our bed. I didn't sleep very well since he was still wheezing and coughing his barky cough. (I'm pretty sure you know where this is going.) Well, Friday morning when I was changing his clothes, I noticed that he was really struggling to breathe. His skin was sucked up under his ribcage with every breath (now I know it's called retracting). I was pretty scared and called a nurse at our pediatrician's office. She said I needed to have him seen, but they were full and to call a different pediatrician's office in the same health system. I did and fortunately got an appointment in an hour. I gave him a couple alubterol treatments but that didn't help at all. And I gave him his steroids in his bottle. I should note that Samuel is a great eater and was still very hungry, it was just hard to eat when he couldn't breathe.

I loaded everyone up early and got on the road and made it most of the way there and then got lost. I was 15 minutes late. The receptionist had to ask if the doctor could still see us. When we got back to see her, she basically said right away that it's croup and he's pretty bad. She was a really sweet doctor. They gave him an epinephrine treatment in the nebulizer (used to treat croup - not the albuterol) which helped right away. He sounded so much better. And they also gave him a steroid shot since he was so bad. She also had us wait there for a while just to make sure he was okay. Then we went home...

(to be continued)