ah, asthma

It's 1 am, and we just got back from the ER. Jacob's breathing kind of deteriorated, or at least it seemed so to us, so we took him in about 10 pm. We were done by 11:30 pm, but as we were walking out the door, the nurse ran back to us and said, "Wait, did we give him his first dose of prednisolone yet?" Um, no. We were walking out with a prescription for oral prednisolone, and I don't know what we thought we would do with it, because as I mentioned in my last post, Jacob doesn't do oral medicine.

So, we try the medicine cup. Then we try the syringe. Several times. Heath holds him down and gives the dose. I hold him down and Heath gives the dose. I hold him and the nurse gives the dose. Same gargling and spitting scenerio described in my last post. Finally, the doctor comes in and says, "You are taking the medicine. Either you will drink it, or I will give you a shot." So Jacob tries to drink it himself, in little bitty sips with much shuddering and much of the medicine leaking out the sides of his mouth. He's almost to the bottom of the medicine cup when he throws up all over himself and the bed.

So, we got the shot. He has viral croup on top of the flu, so that explains the horrible sounding cough despite the doctor saying his lungs were clear this morning and despite regular albuterol treatments. We were worried his blood oxygen levels would be down in the high 80's - low 90's by the time we got there, because of how he sounded, but he was between 95-97% when we got there, and up to 99-100% by the time we left. So that was reassuring. Also, the hour of struggling over oral medicine was confirmation that not getting the Tamiflu was probably a good choice.

I almost forgot to mention - my brother Jeff came over to stay with Ethan while we took Jacob to the hospital. Ethan was sound asleep, but woke up right as we were leaving, and cried for us for over an hour. Jeff couldn't get Ethan to be quiet long enough to realize who he was. Finally Jeff says to Ethan, "Do you like football?" (knowing he does). "Yes," Ethan says. (Apparently Ethan decided it was okay to talk to the strange man if it was about football.) Jeff says, "Did you know Uncle Jeff used to play football?" "You did?!" Ethan says. Jeff said it only took about 2 minutes of football storytelling before Ethan was peacefully back to sleep. He woke up a couple more times before we got home, and briefly cried out; but then he cried out "Uncle Jeff!" instead of "Mommy! Daddy!"