The Croup

Friday night Lily was pretty tired after a long day of fun with Daddy--she got a walk to the park and swings in the morning, and then swimming (well, splashing in a shallow pool at Minnehaha Park) in the afternoon. Here I am that evening with my new haircut holding her. She looks pretty wiped out. She had a little bit of a cough about 7, we noticed, and then an hour later she coughed again a couple times and it sounded worse, kind of wheezy. We fed her with a bottle at 9 and put her down for the night, but at about 11 she woke us up coughing like a barking seal. That's the telltale sign of croup, I now know, and it's quite alarming to hear coming out of your child's body. It's very loud and sounds like it hurts awfully. John took her into the bathroom and turned on the hot shower to steam up the room to help her stop coughing while I called the 24-hr. nurse line at Children's Clinic and the nurse said we did the exact right thing, and to keep her in the bathroom with the shower running for another ten minutes, and then bring her in to the ER at Children's. Hospital. Well, that was kind of alarming. But we got her calmed down, which is good because everytime she coughed, it inflamed the tissue and made it harder to breathe. Poor baby. It just came on so suddenly!

The Children's Hospital was fantastic. They had me in a room with Lily before John even finished parking the car. She had to get epinephrine, or a "neb" as they called it, and that helped immediately, but not enough, so they had to do it a second time about 2 hours later. She didn't like the mask so that was kind of a challenge, because they didn't want to agitate her and make the cough worse. They were all very wonderful nurses and doctors and we felt really taken care of. The hours kind of flew by and suddenly it was 3 in the morning and they decided to admit her overnight to keep an eye on her in case she needed any more nebs. There was one rocker and one pull-out bed in the room, so John and I took shifts on the bed to get some rest while keeping an eye on her. Luckily she slept very well and they didn't have to give her any more of the nebs. The also gave her a steriod shot with the first neb, and that is going to work longer term, over the next several days, to keep the inflamation down.

She slept very well, most of the time with her hinder in the air, which is extremely cute. Then in the morning when she woke up, she took some formula and a new thing: Pedialyte, which I guess is like Gatorade for babies. Keeping her hydrated is our main goal for the next few days while she gets better, and she's doing fine with that so far. She's such a little trooper, she was happy and laughing again this morning when she felt better. John went home for a while in the early morning to take care of Cocoa while I stayed with Lily, and I just climbed right up on the crib/bed and held her while she fell asleep again. I turned on the TV to get to her sleep, and that worked pretty well as enough of a distraction to get to sleep. We watched Spongebob. I've never done that before, turned on the TV for her to watch it, but I figured this was a good time to do it.

When we brought her home John and I had both had about 2 hours of sleep overnight, so I crashed first, slept for 6 hours, and then he crashed after doing a whirlwind cleanup of the house, catching up on laundry and dishes. He's asleep now and I'm getting ready to go back to sleep but wanted to sit in Lily's room for a while (where I'm writing this) and listen to her breathing. So far in the three hours she's been asleep she only woke up once coughing and it wasn't too bad. I put the baby plug in (the pacifier) and she went back to sleep.

okay, my eyes are closing of their own accord now, so I'll take the hint and go to bed. I don't think we'll have to go back to the hospital tonight. Cross your fingers.