RSV = ER Trip. My favorite place to be.

I haven't posted for awhile, because my friend Amber came up to Michigan from Iowa to see me. It was so much fun - we played board games and laughed till we peed our pants we cried. Our kids are close in age - she has a daughter who's three, a daughter who's 18 months (3 weeks older than Beastie) and a son who's four months (eleven days younger than The Babe.) The kids all played and had a good time, and our friend Julie came and saw us too. She has a whole passle of kids, and the youngest is two weeks older than Beastie. So it was a crazy house, but it was also totally awesome.

However.

On Thursday, The Babe had his 4 month well baby checkup. He had had a little cough for a day or so, and I asked the doctor to take a close listen to his chest. He was wheezing, but not too bad, and with all his symptoms, she diagnosed RSV.

All weekend, poor Babe coughed and coughed and cried and fussed and was generally miserable. He started feeling better yesterday, Saturday, but was still coughing. He really seemed to be getting better, though - laughing and playing like normal.

This morning when I woke up, I saw that The Babe's chest was sucking in as he breathed, and he was making the most godawful wheezing sound. He was breathing between 60 and 72 breaths per minute. That's a lot of breaths. You try it and see how you feel. I gave him an emergency inhaler treatment and called the doctor, and they could hear him wheeze and cough too. The nurse counted his breaths with me and told me to get him to the emergency room as soon as we could, and to call 911 if he turned blue. I said okay, but what I was thinking was no shit, asshole.

So we packed everyone up and headed into the hospital, where the nurses and doctors proceeded to completely freak out over his ridiculously fast breathing, and also, make me feel like a total idiot for not bringing him in sooner. They didn't believe that he had just started doing this out of nowhere.

Luckily the respiratory therapist was kind and understanding, and he took The Babe's pulse and checked his O2 levels and all that, and then the doctor gave us a different medication, and the respiratory therapist showed me how to give the inhaler, and within thirty seconds of getting that new medicine, The Babe was breathing normally.

We're home now, and he's in his pack 'n' play, talking to his stuffed panda. Now I'm just praying it doesn't happen again. I can't handle that kind of stress more than, say once a year. Or less.