Phew!

Thank goodness this weekend looks to be a lot more pleasant than last weekend. Noah started coming down with a cold last week, mostly just a stuffy nose in the morning that would clear up by noontime. But on Friday, it didn't clear up, and by that evening he had a bad enough cold that we took him in to the pediatrician, just in case. The pediatrician assured us that his lungs sounded fine, and to run the vaporizer in whatever room he was in. Unfortunately, by 10 pm that night, Noah was definitely starting to tighten up in his chest, and I set us up in the bedroom with two vaporizers and the rocking chair. I was prepared to rock him there all night, since he seemed to have a much easier time being held upright. By midnight however, he was laboring pretty hard to breathe and sounded AWFUL, so we called the ambulance to take him to the emergency room. As if that wasn't upsetting enough, when I was in the ambulance with him and we were preparing to leave, I asked to go to CMMC instead of Farmington only to have the paramedic tell me that with the way he sounded, we didn't have the extra time to go to CMMC. Scary!!

They gave him a nebulizer treatment in the ambulance, which seemed to help a little, but not nearly enough. So at the hospital, they decided to admit him. Turned out he had croup, and with his narrow airway, what should have been just a mild case turned out to cause more trouble with him. In the end, it wasn't that bad. He received two more nebulizer treatments and a shot of decadron (a steroid to held reduce the swelling in his vocal chords), and I slept propped up on some pillows on a hospital bed with him in my arms. All in all, despite our originial hesitation about bringing him to Farmington, they treated him, and us, very well. Before the ambulance left, I told Darren to make sure he brought Noah's NICU discharge summary with him, so that the hospital staff would know what they were working with, and they were very pleased that we had. They all commented on how amazing he looks considering everything he went through.

They ended up discharging him around 1 pm on Saturday and sent us home with an oral dose of decadron to give him that evening. And so ended the most current leg of our tour of New England hospitals. We now stand at five ;o) He slept most of the day on Saturday, but by Sunday was starting to act like his old self. He seems to be completely cleared up and feeling good now. PHEW!