A Parent's Nightmare

Over the last eight months, either by dumb luck or actual parental skill, my wife and I have done a relatively good job of keeping our daughter from getting sick. With the exception of a few runny noses, she had yet to have any kind of major illness (which is also a good thing because I recently discovered that most of the cold remedies for babies have been pulled from store shelves because one of the ingredients was causing throat closures in infants!

We were proud of the fact that our streak of good health had held strong for so long...until this week.

On Tuesday, our daughter had started to get a runny nose, which is nothing out of the ordinary, and it didn't seem to slow her down from bouncing around in her Jumparoo or trying to climb every piece of furniture in our house like it was rock wall. She had had a runny nose on a few occasions before and it wasn't out of the ordinary, especially considering the season and the two days per week she spends in daycare.

That night, however, she started making a wheezing noise while breathing. Again, not seeming to slow her down or dampen her mood we purchased a cold air humidifier to put in her room and thought nothing of it. With the baby monitor on the highest volume setting we listened to her wheeze throughout the night.

She was still asleep when my wife left for work, and even though she had managed to get ten wheezy hours of sleep without a problem, I had planned on calling to set an appointment with our pediatrician when she woke up.

Unfortunately, my daughter had a different idea in mind, because a few minutes after my wife walked out of the house she woke up by screaming, instead of by her normal morning babbling. When I walked into her room I could tell that she seemed to be having trouble breathing, and when I opened up her pajamas i could see her struggling to breath so badly that her chest seemed to be caving in. (I later learned that she was having "chest retractions")

Instead of calling the doctor to set an appointment I called the advice nurse who, after asking me a series of questions, told me to go straight to the emergency room.

The emergency room? I knew that I'd inevitably end up making a frantic run to the emergency room some day, since most kids are accident prone, but I didn't think I would be there with my eight month old daughter. I called my wife to tell her what had happened, grabbed a half empty diaper bag, and got in the car.

Luckily, Wednesday morning isn't a busy time for the emergency room and when we arrived we were not only lead straight to an exam room, but our room quickly filled up with about seven nurses, as one of them said "Don't worry, it's just that there's nothing going on today so everyone is coming to see if they can help."

After a quick albuterol treatment (the stuff in an asthma inhaler) my daughter started breathing much easier, and after a short wait, my wife, who had joined us, and I were lead to get my daughter an x-ray of her chest.

If your infant child has yet to get an x-ray, let me say that it's an experience you are much better not going through. Only one parent is allowed in the room while the x-ray is taking place, so, for "just in case" purposes, my wife stepped out of the room, leaving me to be the luck one to wear the ten-pound lead apron (so that my daughter wouldn't be an only child, if you know what I mean).

Since babies are inherently wiggly, they can't be trusted to lie still on a table during an x-ray. Instead, they are placed into a contraption that looks like some sort of futuristic torture device, that involves them sitting on a "bicycle seat" while two clear plastic "claws" hold them in an upright position with their hands straight up in the air.

The worst part of the process, was that I had to be the one to hold my daughter's hands up, while the x-ray technicians ran (literally) into another room, leaving me wondering if the lead apron was really enough to protect "my boys" and forcing me to watch my daughter look at me with watering crying eyes that asked "Why are you making me do this Daddy?"

After a short wait, and some more albuterol and steroids for my daughter, the doctor came in to tell us that the x-ray's showed the possibility of pneumonia in my daughter's lungs, and that her cough, which sounded like an impression of the sea lions in San Francisco, was most likely croup.

While it wasn't the worst diagnosis we could have received, and certainly not the worst reason to spend half a day at the hospital, it was a little heartbreaking to find out that our daughter was really sick for the first time, and with an illness that can't be treated directly. (Apparently with croup you can only treat the symptoms, not the actual virus that causes it.)

After a few days of running the humidifier 24/7 in whatever room our daughter is in, she seems to be doing better already, and her cough should subside soon. And, as an added bonus, I have been breathing easier than ever!

So, while no parent ever really wants to make that trip to the emergency room, I'm glad that we were able to knock out our first one on something relatively easy to deal with. But, knowing my personal history of proneness to accidents, I'm sure it won't be our last trip.