A Blog by Any Other Name has a new name

Well, I've changed the name of this blog. So I guess it turns out that the other name for the Blog by Any Other Name is "Adventures in Parenting". As lame as this might be, I've decided that I'm just going to use this blog as a journal of sorts to keep track of the various Bree and Evy things that Mom always says I should write down.

ER visit

So, we took Evy to the emergency room last night. She and Bree both have been fighting a cough/cold for the last week or so, and while Bree's has gotten significantly better over the past few days, Evy's developed into the full-fledged croup -- complete with the "barking" cough and constricted breathing. She's fine now, but tonight we'll probably have another all-night vigil making sure she's still breathing OK.

Yesterday, she was laughing and playing in typically good spirits, but I noticed her stopping to catch her breath several times throughout the day. When we put her to bed last night, her breathing was labored and rattly, and every few minutes she would bark out a coughing spasm. It was just painful to hear. Andrea contacted the pediatrician's on-call nurse, and was told just to watch her and call back if anything got worse. Well, needless to say, things got worse.

I think Andrea was up with Evy pretty much all night, but about 3 AM, I woke up to the sound of our baby girl crying and coughing uncontrollably. The on-call nurse said that croupy babies typically wake up coughing, scare themselves, and then start crying, just making the whole thing worse, and that's exactly what happened with our little lamb. It just sounded awful. She'd cry and half cough/half wheeze out the rest of her breath, then suck in what more breath she could through a swollen throat. Meanwhile Andrea was doing all she could just to calm the girl down. She was following the nurse's instructions of alternating between steamy baths and taking her outside to breathe the cold damp air.

It sounds crazy, but taking a kid out into the cold night air is really one of the best things you can do for croup. The cool humidity helps to relax the constricted airways so the child can breathe more easily. In fact, the breathing treatment they gave Evy at the ER was simply a cool mist. It may have been some kind of medicine, but I would guess it was simply a vaporized saline solution of some sort. She was also given a steroid to help her body fight off the virus, and we were given a prescription for a few days' worth as well. The doctors also took some X-rays to make sure there was no liquid in her lungs, etc. and all of that was clear.

The thing that made us pull the trigger last night was vomit. I think that Evy just got so worked up in the crying/coughing milieu that she threw up. She wasn't otherwise sick to her stomach, and normally a little throw up might not be such a big deal, but last night it was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I called the on-call nurse again immediately, and after listening to Evy's troubled breathing over the phone, the nurse recommended that we take her in.

So, when we got home from the hospital at 4:30 or so, I could not go to sleep because I kept thinking of writing this journal entry. I should have been dog tired, but the wheels just kept on turning. I didn't get up though. Not until 11:30.