Merry Christmas, from the ER

Okay, we weren't actually in the ER on Christmas. We took the baby to Syracuse to visit with his great grandparents and great aunts and uncles (about five hours from home) the weekend before Christmas. It was a bad decision, I admit it. The Baby was sick. He had a fever of 103 three days before we left and was sniffing and snotting around. The Baby was miserable. The Great Grandparents were disappointed. The Great Grandparents won. Well, sort of.

Our logic was this: The Baby wasn’t sleeping, he was a crank, he’d probably sleep all the way there, if we left just a day later than anticipated we’d only be gone for two full days, my grandparents weren’t afraid of his cold germs and, like I said, they were terribly disappointed at the notion of us not coming for a visit. They’ve only seen The Baby once. I’ve been to two funerals in a week’s time. I was thinking sad, un-Christmassy thoughts. So we packed up the snot-sucker, the nebulizer, Prednisone, and the Tylenol and hit the road.

I was right about the sleep. He slept until lunch, when he woke up like an angel and charmed most of the workers and customers at the Arby’s in Scranton. He even ate. He slept the rest of the way to Syracuse without incident. Once there, he was fine for about a half an hour. I was congratulating myself on deciding to throw caution to the wind. Then The Baby started crying and didn't stop. We were all beside ourselves. He acted like his belly hurt. I called the pediatrician, as I suspected the Prednisone might be a culprit. He said to get some Maalox for The Baby. That seemed to help minimally. He was not a happy camper. We went through three months of reflux and umpteen colds and I’ve never seen The Baby cry and carry on so much.

Anyway, The Baby was pretty wheezy and that night my dad (my parents where also in NY for a visit) and I took turns holding him upright to sleep. On my shift, The Baby was in the middle of a rib-rattling coughing fit when he started to throw up. This caused more choking and he was gasping for breath and still puking and he just looked weird. I woke my husband and my dad drove us to the ER. The pediatric ER wasn’t at all busy, so we went right in. The Baby was fine (at least in the sense that he wasn't admitted). He just had an upper respiratory infection and bronchiolitis (he gets this whenever he gets a cold) and wasn’t responding to his nebulizer treatments. It was a long night. I won’t even get into how mommy decided that she didn’t need to pack extra clothes since he doesn’t spit up anymore. :-/

The Baby was still a crank for most of the visit, but my grandparents understood. I’m glad they got to see him. He finally broke out of the crankies about 3 p.m. on Christmas Day.

It ended up being a merry Christmas after all.