Aerin’s first emergency hospital visit

This will be pretty short, just an update. Aerin, my nearly 5-month old sounded like she had a cold on Thursday night, by 3am sounded like bad one, and by morning it was serious and Kim got her to the doctor.

The pediatricians said hell no, go to the hospital, and a short ambulance ride later Aerin was in the ER.

Her abdomen was pulling in she was laboring to breathe so hard. Oddly she seemed in mostly decent spirits, little grumpy, but with a look of “why is this happening and who is going to fix it?” when I got there.

She got a nebulizer three or four times, some epinephrine, anti-inflammatory, IV, blood draws, several medicine pushes, throat X-rays as her throat was trying to close up, and otherwise more medical hospitally stuff than I’ve had in my life in about three hours.

Her blood O2 was way down, everything was pretty bad. Initially they suspected they could discharge her that day, but it was such that neither they nor we had much inclination to do so, and she got re-nebulized shortly after the move out of the ER.

This morning she was bright eyed again, sounded bad when she would cough, but has her voice back and was at 95-100% O2 levels except when fussing all morning.

Upon getting home into her bed she slept for several hours, woke up, played a bit, slept some more, woke up, played some more and then I enforced the bedtime she normally passes out at (which she was a little reluctant to do, but not overly complaining). We don’t really have her on a set bedtime, but she passes out normally at 8ish so I put her down then.

From 8-2am I listened to most of her breathing. Other than a light snore, back to where we were a couple of days ago.

Doctors say a couple of cases like this came in that day, or maybe that she was the second one, I don’t remember except they were asking about turtles. Both kids were just small, and a minor swelling of a small airway = no way to breathe.

Although I think she’s doing fine at the moment, she’s sleeping within earshot where I can hear all breathing, and she’s got a Snuza Hero on her in the event she stops breathing for more than a few seconds. Her belly is once again such that it’s a little difficult to keep it on, but I’d rather have a few false alarms that not.

As of right now they’re classifying this as Croup, which seems to be a collection of symptoms rather than an actual disease. Based on the Westley Score scale of severity, she was at least at a 10, which is severe. As I don’t know what her level of consciousness was, couldn’t comment. It was bad.

And now she’s better and it’s kind of crazy the difference a day makes. We left with no medication, just were told come back or call if anything goes wrong. Given two pieces of paper, neither of which really pertained, and just walked out of the hospital.

Such a weird couple of days.