Respiratory Season

So, at the rate I'm going, maybe I should just shoot for a quarterly blog post and slide show :) It's not quite time for the Spring post according to that schedule, but we're pretty excited about spring around here. Playing outside again, going for walks when you don't have to bundle up - we're welcoming spring with open arms.

Unfortunately for us we're not far enough into Spring to be out of what we recently found out is "respiratory season". Two weeks ago, Elias came down with a pretty bad cough. We took him into the doctor's with a diagnosis of RSV and a nebulizer and went to work giving him breathing treatments and trying to make him as comfortable as possible. The week went on and he didn't seem to get much better. He had moments where he'd perk up, but for the most part he just wanted to snuggle and had no appetite. On Thursday night last week, Elias was up a lot of the night coughing and Friday we had a check up with the doctor. When we went in, the doctor tested Elias' oxygen saturation levels and found out they were 82-85. Normal for Colorado is in the mid-90s.

We went home and headed over to Children's Hospital's Urgent Care center and ended up with a room right away. After being put on oxygen, blood taken, IV's started and x-rays taken, we were admitted to their inpatient section for the night. Elias had RSV/bronchiolitis induced pneumonia. Thankfully, he improved a lot over night and they decided to send us home with oxygen the next day.

After being home for a day, we got a call from Children's saying that they needed to do another blood test and that they wanted us to come back in. Heading back, we found ourselves readmitted and staying overnight again. They had found the H. Flu bacteria in one of Elias' blood cultures, which had the potential to be pretty serious. They wanted to watch him and give him a few doses of strong antibiotics via IV to make sure everything was killed.

The next day, they decided to let us go home again. Elias was improving so much and we had the option to get the antibiotics in a shot form, so we headed home. For the next three days we headed to the doctor's office for a shot. Today was our last day and it's a good thing. Elias started to associate the place and the different things we did right before the shot and was fussing way before the needle went in. Also, today was our last day of being on oxygen. After being off his oxygen for almost an hour, Elias' saturation levels were at 97 - hooray! We'll go in for one more check tomorrow, but we should be done with that for now.

Elias has been such a trooper through all of this. Once the trauma of getting blood drawn and IVs in, he made do with his arm in a little splint. As he got stronger he just continued doing what he wanted regardless of the IV/splint or the oxygen tubing. I don't think he noticed it too much, at least until he ran out of tubing and it yanked him backwards. But he's on the mend and we're all glad to have our happy, curious, mischievous little boy back.

Here are few pictures from the past week or so: