Emme and the croup

I'm sorry about the sideways picture. But she's still cute.






Brad and I had little Emme in the ER last night. Here's how the saga unfolded...

Yesterday afternoon Emme developed a cough which seemed to only bother her during her nap. It was "barky" but it didn't seem to be an issue. Last night a little before 11 pm I heard her coughing and moving around in bed. She was fussy and when I went in I could really hear her struggling with each breath. She was wheezing and her barky cough got markedly worse when she was upset. I called the pediatrician on-call around 11:15. It happened to be Emme's doctor. He could hear her breathing over the phone as I talked to him. He "diagnosed" her with croup and told me there was medicine for it but it couldn't wait until tomorrow morning.

Emme was in pretty good spirits. As I said earlier, the cough was aggravated by her being upset or crying. Once in the ER waiting area, she got a little worked up when we wouldn't let her touch something and started her "bark" again. They got us in pretty quickly and wanted to start breathing treatments right away. We were happy to hear that from an initial assessment, the doctor thought the severity of her case was only a 3 or 4 on a scale of 10. So, there really wasn't much to worry about.

She was given 2 breathing treatments, some meds for her slight fever, and steroids to help widen her airways. After waiting a couple hours to see that she hadn't had a bad reaction to the treatments, we were sent home with a prescription for antibiotics (to ward off pneumonia) and steroids (to keep her airway open).

Emme has turned out to be a stellar patient. Obviously scared and confused, her most common display of sadness was a pouty lip and big tears that would occasionally roll down her pink cheeks. She really lost it during the X-Rays. She sat still for the front view. But when we had to hold her arms up against her ears and force her to stay still for a side view, she decided she had had enough. They were able to get the X-Ray and she calmed down really quickly.

Croup is not fun, but at least not too serious in this case.