The last 36 hours

On Friday night Lucy started running a fever.  She started coughing a little in the night and it was a barking cough that sounded like a seal.  I was pretty sure she had Croup.  On Saturday morning she had audible wheezes which turned into stridor (a growling, gasping sound when she would breathe in and out).  She had Croup when she was two so I knew that it was a virus and would run its course.  We sat in the bathroom with the steam running to help with the barking cough and stridor.

Mike and Emma Jane went up to Mayo to work on the lofts again.  After Lucy's nap she came into the bedroom where I was folding laundry and was in respiratory distress.  She was struggling to take a breath.   I opened her PJ shirt and she was using her stomach muscles to breathe.  Her diaphram was retracting under her sternum.  Her breathing was ragged and loud.  She looked scared.

I put her in the car and drove her to the pediatric ER at St. Francis.  The triage nurse took one look at her through the window and waved us through the doors.  They put a pulse ox monitor on her and she was showing 87% oxygen.  They immediately started treating her with racemic epinephrine and Decadron.  We stayed in the ER for about two hours and had a couple of breathing treatments before we were admitted to the children's hospital for observation overnight. 

She is so much better this morning that she wants to ride her bike.  She is all finished with being tethered to a oxygen saturation monitor.  The hospital bed that goes up and down and up and down has lost its appeal.  The playstation is of no interest and the TV with DVD is old news.  She wants to go home.

Her color is back and she is breathing quietly and with relative ease.  So we are just waiting on the Doctor to tell us we can go home.

What a difference 24 hours (and good medicines) make.