Lucy and RSV

Over the weekend, all the children got sick: Andrew first, followed by Edward and Lucy. By Tuesday, Lucy and Edward were still really sick, so I took them to the doctor. Edward didn't have anything really treatable (strep, ear infection, etc.). Lucy, however, had all the symptoms of bronchiolitis, probably due to RSV, so we started treating it as RSV. Given how illnesses spread, and the similarities of the coughs in our house, all the children have the same virus, but it just affects them differently. A 5-year-old gets a fever for a day and a nasty cough. A 3-year-old gets a fever, an earache, a nasty cough, croup, and a wheeze. A baby gets everything, but it's much worse because her lungs are too small.

Since she is 11 months old, and they have too many cases of this here to handle all babies at the hospital, they try having the parents care for the child, with trips to the outpatient RSV clinic at the hospital as needed. We had a pretty bad night on Tuesday listening to her wheeze, wheeze, stop breathing, wheeze, wheeze, wheeze, stop, and so on. She got to sit in the bathroom with the hot shower on for a while, besides having medicine.

This is our friend the breathing machine (nebulizer) that delivers her Albuterol dose every 4 to 6 hours. The hospital delivered the machine to our door and I got the prescription at the pharmacy. She really does better breathing and her color comes back after we use it. Last night she started to feel better and slept all night; her breathing got better and her fever went down. She even smiled at us! We are hoping that she is on the mend, though, of course, we will be watching closely. We are thankful for access to health care and for modern medicine. We are thankful for prayers.

I haven't had very many bright spots the last few days, but here was one funny thing Edward said. I asked him, "Are you skinny?" He pointed to his skin and said, "I have skin! And when you are bleeding, you have blood."