He's actually had a mild stuffy nose off and on for almost two weeks now, so we thought he just had a minor cold. It didn't seem to affect him at all, so we were just letting it run its course. Then, yesterday morning, he was so stuffed up that he was having trouble eating (breastfeeding + plugged nose = recipe for disaster). He also seemed warm to me, so I took his temperature: 100.8. That's considered only a "low grade" fever, but Gus decided to keep him home (Gus was already staying home because we had a plumber coming to repair a leak in our main water line). He seemed to be okay for most of the day, but then everything started to fall apart at dinner time. He could barely eat because he was so stuffed up, but he was crying because he was hungry. We did everything we could think of to unstuff him: a warm bath, saline drops, suctioning out his nose, running the humidifier... He finally got enough to eat and went to sleep... only to wake up with the worst sounding cough that I have ever heard in my life!
That's when I knew it was croup. He was completely hoarse, and the cough sounded like a dog barking. He also had this high-pitched wheezing noise (called stridor) in between coughs. It was horrible! I had never been around someone with croup before, but I remembered reading about it in various baby books. It really was exactly as they described! The cough was definitely not normal. For the record, though, Gus thought that it WAS normal, and he thought I was overreacting when I said we should take him to Urgent Care (he now acknowledges that I was right... score one for Mom!).
So we got to Urgent Care at 10:30, and were finally seen by the doctor at around noon. Right away, he identified it as croup (the cough is a dead giveaway). He measured Nikos' oxygen saturation level, and it wasn't great. So he started him on a breathing treatment with a nebulizer, which meant that he had to wear a little oxygen mask. I almost started crying at that point, because he looked so helpless and miserable!! :( After the breathing treatment, they gave him some medicine (a form of steroids) to reduce the inflammation in his airway. And after THAT, they told us that we needed to take him to the emergency room at the Children's Hospital, just to be safe (the Urgent Care doctors weren't pediatricians, and I guess croup kind of freaks them out-- especially when the patient is so young). They called ahead and told them to expect us, so off we went!
After a quick side trip to Taco Bell (and a brief stop to breastfeed in the car), we arrived at the Children's Hospital by 1:30. We finally got out of there at 4:15. All they basically did was confirm the diagnosis, monitor his oxygen level (which was at 100% by the time we left- yay!), and suction him out completely (which was horrible!!! Gus held him. The doctor made me turn away!). They gave us some good advice on how to make him more comfortable over the next few days, but said there was no further treatment needed (the breathing treatment plus the steroids are usually all they do... and it's a one-time thing).
So now we just have to ride this thing out... Croup is what they call a "nighttime disease," meaning that it gets awful at night and sometimes disappears completely during the day. The doctor said that the cough usually hangs around for two or three nights, but then it should go away. In the meantime, our little guy has spent most of the day sleeping (in between all the poking and prodding). I even took this picture of him, asleep on Gus' shoulder when we were in the ER:
Poor little man! I hope he feels better soon!!
No comments:
Post a Comment