To the Hospital (and Back)

The other night Evan woke up  and barked twice. At this point I'm supposed to say "Oh, Croup". Either we don't have croup in India or it is called something else, because I never heard of it till the first time Evan caught it back at the end of summer. And that was a mild attack so he never actually barked.

Anyway Evan woke up at 930pm the other night with a bad case of croup. He was barking and gulping painfully for air and retracting (I'm a croup expert now) where the skin over his chest and abdomen is pulled tight as tries to get air into his lungs. You could see the outlines of his organs. It was scary.

Jo called Karen and Tim and then calmed Evan down a bit (the more agitated he gets the harder it is to breathe). Tim came over to keep an eye on Vivian who stayed fast asleep. I found a pair of pants. Jo cradled Evan (it would have been impossible to put him in a car seat without getting him really agitated) and we drove off to Seton.

This was my second trip to Seton Emergency (Jo ended up there a couple of days after Vivian was born - when she accidentally discovered her newly formed egg allergy). They seem a bit chaotic at Seton - no one seems to know what any one else wants done, but eventually they get it done and we get out feeling better.

So it was this time.  The triage nurse checked Evan out. About 10 minutes later a doctor with s strange sense of humor came by. About 20 minutes after that a tech set up a cool mist breather and handed the respirator mask to us and disappeared. Evan wasn't going to have a mask strapped to him - so for the next hour or so Jo nursed Evan while I held the mask in close proximity to his nose. Then the doctor stopped by again and asked if Evan had been given his steroid medication yet and mumbled about how it could not be done while he was being breast fed. Finally another nurse came and gave him his medication. Somewhere in the middle of all this a lady from patient registration stood around and waited for us to ask her questions.

By 11:30pm Evan's breathing was a bit quieter and they let us go home. He got better as the night progressed though Jo and I grew steadily more tired. By morning Evan looked and sounded almost normal and the scare from the evening before seemed like a mere shadow that had long passed.