ER

We made our first trip to the Children's' Memorial Hospital Emergency Room on Friday night. Eddie came down with a cold on Wednesday and on Friday morning it had settled into his chest and he was wheezing. Now this has happened in the past when he gets a cold, but it usually doesn't seem to bother him too much and it goes away in a day. But on Friday he was not himself, almost lifeless. By the afternoon he could hardly walk and would collapse to the floor and just lie there attempting to play. When Eddie got home from work we went to the ER, at the urging of our pediatrician. Because of his severe oxygen obstruction (triage classified it as a "code red" which is the most serious!) he had to receive three breathing treatments and a dose of the oral steroid Prednisone. The breathing treatments entailed pinning him down and placing a mask on his face so that he could inhale the albutural for up to 10 minutes. He screamed and thrashed the whole ten minutes and all three times. It was the hardest thing we have ever been through with him. At one moment during the second treatment I teared up, remembering the days of colic and holding him as he screamed in pain and feeling so helpless. This was a close second to that agony; the difference was that after the 10 minutes of hell, he would light up and was all playful and talkative. The drugs do make him a tad hyper, which is an expected side effect. We were there from 6 p.m. - 11 p.m. and all in all, it was not too bad. Eddie did very well just sitting there between the treatments, reading books and playing with his choo-choos. it was almost reminiscent of being on an airplane, as we of course did not want him walking around and exploring. He is still taking an inhaler version of the albutural and the oral steroid, which I am a tad skeptical about, being a naturalist. But breathing is the most important. Hopefully this is just something that we will have to monitor when he gets colds and it won't develop into full-blown asthma...I don't think I could handle regular episodes of pinning him down to administer doses of medicine. I feel like he was sort of traumatized by it too because he did not sleep well at all the two nights afterward; he woke up five times on Saturday night and was all out of sorts, even still screaming after I picked him up and sat in the chair with him. Poor guy :(