Parent Merit Badges

We've racked up quite a few already; pregnancy, childbirth, colic, sleep-deprivation, teething, middle-of-the-night vomiting, elbows coming out of socket, 104 fevers, Diaper Rash from Hell, we've even conquered MRSA. Last night, we added the Late-night ER Visit. Jack was acting a little off at lunch and wouldn't eat, which isn't entirely unusual. He'd gotten up at six so I put him down for a nap at noon, and when he woke up he had a low-grade fever. I gave him some Motrin and put on The Jungle Book, and he seemed to be coming down with a little cold. No big deal. I gave him a decongestant before bed, plugged in the humidifier in his room, and kissed him goodnight without much worry. I used to think the hardest thing to listen to was a screaming baby. I was wrong. To date, the hardest thing to listen to is your child struggling to breathe. What started out as a minor cold quickly grew into full-blown Croup in a matter of hours. I was in the living room with night owl Matteas when I heard Jack coughing from his bed, the tell-tale barking sound and the wheezing gasp when he tried to breathe in. I deposited Matteas in bed with Aaron, then scooped up Jack and took him into the bathroom to steam him. He was coughing uncontrollably and moaning between gasps for air. Now, we've been pretty sick before, but my mother's intuition was telling me that steam and Motrin weren't going to cut it on this particular night. I contemplated sending Aaron to the ER with Jack while I stayed home with Matteas, but Jack wanted me to be with him and the more upset he got the harder it was for him to breathe, so I decided we would all go together. I'd called Jack's doctor before we left to make sure they wouldn't turn us away at Steven's and send us on to Children's, and she said at the very least they could give him temporary treatment at Steven's. She called ahead and told them we were coming. If you want to get VIP service at a hospital and cut straight to the front of the line, tell them you have a toddler in respiratory distress. I walked in carrying Jack and the triage nurse ditched the patient she was with, clipped a lead to Jack's finger and immediately walked us back to a room. No waiting, no paperwork, no inane questions about what my son ate that day and how much he was peeing. She did, however, ask one funny question: "Are his lips swollen?" "No, those are just his lips." A brief comic respite in the midst of a scary time, and I wasn't too freaked out not to smile. We spent about three hours total in the ER, and after some steroids, popsicles and cool mist we went home with a bottle of blue cherry-flavored magic. It took about thirty minutes for the steroids to reduce the inflammation in Jack's airway, but after that we were greatly relieved to see him misbehaving and being cheerfully uncooperative with the cool mist treatment. Nothing says "I'm feeling better" like defiance. When we first got to the ER he was feeling too low to do anything but cling to me and nod politely when the doctors asked him questions("How old are you? You must be what, five years old?"). We got home around 3 a.m., changed our popsicle-stained jammies, then had slices of still-warm banana bread and some cold milk before finally heading to bed. We are all a little under-slept today, but happy to be basking in the rosy afterglow of normalcy after a Very Bad Sickness. Jack needs three doses of steroids over the next three days and he sounds a little hoarse, but we're over the scary part. Aaron is coming home from work early and brining Mexican food. Matteas is napping, I'm blogging, and Jack is making sparkly dinosaurs. There's going to be glitter everywhere for the next couple of days. Life is good.