3 weeks ago our household inherited a lovely cold, it started with Miss Evelyn and moved into the boys. First I had Evelyn into the dr, then a week later Logan was in. After 2 weeks everyone started sounding better, a few days later I was calling the clinic again cause it was getting worse. They said to wait it out.
Saturday comes around and the boys are worse. They are struggling to breath and wheezing. Their cough catches their breath. I'm not sure of anything harder than watching your babies struggle to breath.
11:30 Saturday night, I'm convinced Sawyer needs to be seen, he was really bad off and when he cried, it sounded like he lost his voice. My sister comes up to sit at the house so we can head to the children's hospital.
After listening, chest x-rays and being tested for RSV among other things, Sawyer gets a nebulizer of albuterol. It doesn't do much but does give him his cry back. They gave him a neb of epinephrine and it made a world of difference, he was sleeping and breathing soundly. The RSV came back positive and he was diagnosed with Bronchiolitis due to RSV. The doctor decided she wanted to keep him to monitor him.
We then asked them to register and look at Logan because he wasn't much better. She immediately said she would be keeping him to but that we'd go through the same battery of tests first.
They had to fight to get us a shared room, I am still breastfeeding after all, but they did and it was so much easier that way.
I was a wreck. I'm already stressed out enough and now we're adding this too. I lost it, I was crying, emotional and scared.
We got up to the room at 6am. We had three goals to meet for discharge: 1) eating/pooping/peeing enough - this one was never a problem 2) keeping their oxygen levels up - again, they were 100% when we got there and stayed right around that the whole time 3) to sleep without a struggle - this would be our challenge.
We spent the morning suctioning noses, listening to chests etc. they got another neb of epinephrine at 645am. The boys never needed any oxygen and didn't receive any more nebulizers. I was told to help myself to the patient food since I had to eat enough to feed the actual patients.
We waited. I hung out in the room, walked around, and talked to the nurses. It was boring and stressful.
At noon the boys were holding their own, they were still congested and a little wheezy, but had no problem keeping their stats up. The doctor came around and said that if the boys came in the clinic in their current condition, he wouldn't hospitalize them. After all, they weren't doing anything to really help them anyways. He said we were likely to discharge later that day or early Monday.
At 3pm, they still hadn't been doing any sort of treatment on them. They decided we could discharge, especially since they had spent all day teaching me what they were looking for.
We went home. The boys were good all night, but I still stayed up and watched, worried. By morning Logan wasn't sounding the best and Sawyer was getting worse. I called Dr landers to fill her in on everything from the weekend, she wanted to see them.
She was not happy. They were not doing well. Both were struggling to breath, both had lost a few ounces of their precious weight. Both had lower O2 numbers, borderline of needing oxygen therapy. We were at risk of returning to children's hospital. We did a neb of albuterol and surprisingly it made a slight difference. She was comfortable sending us home and gave us a prescription for albuterol/neb.
The boys were sounding pretty good, sleeping and breathing soundly. They started getting worse again so I gave them their next Neb, success for Sawyer, less for Logan but he's definitely sounded worse before.
It's going to be another long sleepless night watching my babies breath.
RSV is scary for infants, especially up to a year. Kids and adults probably get here every winter but it just presents itself as a cold. Babies just can't handle it as well, and it can be fatal. There's no treatment, just run its course and help as needed with oxygen. Even nebulizers have a low success rate against RSV.
The good news: RSV hits its peak between 5 and 7 days. We know we are at least 5 and maybe 6 days in, almost through. I the unfortunate part is that they jumped from one illness to RSV so we can't be 100% when it started, it's just an estimate. Either way, we're almost there. Just trying to avoid going back to children's.
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