A Scare and Night at the Hospital

Our household has been suffering with a round of colds, and little Girl got hit with it too, only for her it took a turn for the worse on Wednesday night.  Little to our knowledge her cold had been sneaking up on us and causing her throat to swell closing up her airway some.  About mid day her breathing became more labored and we could tell it was difficult and painful for her to breath and swallow, we planned to take her to the doctor on Thursday.  I know it sounds like we should have taken her in right that moment, but she wasn't running a fever and when she was awake, she was alert and for the most part happy, she just sounded awful.  Rachel hardly drank or ate anything all day long but finally fell asleep but was making such an awful sound with her breathing I kept checking on her every few minutes.  Around 11:30PM I decided to change her diaper and try and clean out her nose a little to help her breathing a little, but when I placed her on the changing table it was almost as if she stopped breathing all together.  I grabbed her right back up into my arms and took her out to the living room where David and I could get a better look at her.  We both noticed that Rachel was struggling even more to breath then she had earlier in the day because with each breath her chest was sucking in and her lips were slightly blue.  I told David I was not comfortable waiting until morning for the doctor, we needed to head to the ER.  So we let mom know what was happening and we were off.

  At the ER they had us checked in pretty quick.

And back to our own "special" curtained area.

And then the fun really began, because she didn't care for the breathing mask they wanted to put on her.

But little Girl made it through the first of two breathing treatments and made it onto the next phase of being put onto a humidity hood, which again she wasn't too fond of, but she liked it better then the mask.

 

Eventually Rachel had two breathing treatments, a steroid treatment, and a humidity treatment and she didn't seem to be responding well enough to any of them to make us or the doctors happy . . . . . so an over night observation was required.  By 2:49AM we were finally getting settled into our room and David was heading home to get a couple hours of sleep so he could get David Jr. off to school for a field trip and I stayed with Rachel.  I was completely punch drunk and have no idea if I answered the questions correctly, but I can tell you that the nurses were wonderful and super friendly even that early in the morning.  Big lesson learned for me, is that I need to bring Rachel's big book with me next time we go to the ER, its a binder I have with all of her medical records in it, because I was so exhausted I couldn't remember simple facts like her birth weight.

 

In the end, little Girl was diagnosed with croup, but by early the next day she had great oxygen stats and they were comfortable letting us go home and released her that evening.  The nurses were actually surprised that this was Rachel's first hospitalization since her birth, because DS kids are prone to respiratory infections that will lead to hospital stays, but I just said it was God's blessing and I can only pray He keeps blessing her health that way.