A Scary Week for Buddy

   

Most of you know that our Will was very sick last week and had to spend a couple of days in the hospital. He is so much better now…and so now I feel like we can post about the experience.

Will had Croup, which I’d never heard of before but is apparently a common respiratory virus in toddlers. Adults can catch the virus but it doesn’t cause the same complications. The cough from Croup is very distinctive and sounds like a seal’s bark. He also sounded like he was having some trouble breathing, or at least was having some asthma or something. After one doctor visit we were told that not much was to be done except to wait it out, use a humidifier, and give him medicine for his fevers. The next morning, though, his breathing sounded much worse. I left for work and Whitney took him in to the doctor again, who noticed how forced his breathing had gotten. They checked his oxygen and found it to be quite low and called the ambulance. Whit called me then and we met up at the emergency room at the hospital.

Most of you who’ve met Will when he’s “in his element” would agree that he’s a really social and happy little guy, but for some reason he has developed a serious fear of going to the doctor. In fact, he even gets upset when the lady at the shoe store measures his foot. He just doesn’t seem to like strangers getting all up in his cheese whiz, as we say at the Fowler house! Needless to say, Will was really upset at the doctor’s office, in the ambulance, and at the hospital. Apparently they were able to calm him down a little bit in the ambulance by repeatedly telling him that they were in a “beep-beep”, which is what he calls my parents’ golf cart, and which he loves to ride in.

From what I’ve learned, they can give children steroid shots and/or a breathing treatment to help with the labored breathing, and of course they can give oxygen too. If I understood correctly, any of these usually work pretty quickly. Over the course of the next 24 hours or so they gave him two shots, two breathing treatments, and a whole bunch of medicine for fever, and he still sounded bad. They told us that it was about as bad of a Croup case as they see. What made it worse was that he got really worked up whenever they came to give him the breathing treatment, which in turn closed his airways more, causing his oxygen to drop. The whole visit seemed like this game where the doctors had to try and balance upsetting him and dropping his oxygen with getting him medicine which would help his oxygen. It was stressful and there was no calming him down. We will always remember holding the mask about six inches from his face and hoping the meds just shot in his general direction while he wailed. They obviously were monitoring his oxygen the whole time, so whenever we kept asking if he was breathing well enough (it didn’t really sound like he was) they would point to the oxygen monitor to reassure us. It was hard to listen to. Will has also gotten extremely attached to Whitney, and wasn’t too interested in Daddy, so poor Whitney didn’t get any rest, while Daddy was fortunate enough to piece together an hour here and there.

He got to come home at the end of the second day, very tired, very fussy, and still running a fever, but on a major streak of adequate oxygen levels. They said they weren’t likely to do anything else for him apart from treat the fever, so they booted us out. Fine by me as long as the buddy was okay! Will was feverish for a couple more days, and clingy/fussy/sleepy/not eating for several after that. In the past day or so he’s finally started eating normally again, and we can definitely tell that his signature tummy has receded a little bit. We’re working on plumping it right back up for all to see. We also have heard since then that Croup is going around Austin. Wash those hands and be careful if you have little ones.

I also want to say thank you to my parents and to Whitney’s mother for being there for us last week. In the big scheme of things it ended up being minor, but we didn’t know that and needed a lot of support. Thanks for being there when we needed you.

Here are a few pictures from last week. I chose the cute/happy ones.

Zonked out after the first shot and breathing treatment, still not breathing well, still holding Dad’s ER sticker (this kid LOVES stickers, or “dih-dih”) proudly:

Will’s first smile came in the ER when Daddy ran home to get overnight bags and toys for Will. Elmo and NayNay were important commodities last week and we thank them dearly.

Will sporting his purple gown and sleeping on Grandmommy:

This last one is a wonderful picture that I took a couple of days after we all got home. I would have loved to join them but I’m not sure there was any more room. What do you think?