Ethan's first trip to the ER

Well, we knew it would come sooner or later...our first trip to the ER for Ethan. And surprise - it came on Easter Sunday!!! So, to make a long story (and very long day) short, we had an Easter egg hunt for Ethan's friends Saturday and everyone had a great time (pictures will have to come at a later post...just now getting our computer set up at the new house). So, afterwards, we went to dinner with our friends Brent & Nicole. Ethan started getting cranky during dinner (thinking it was either an allergy outbreak, or he was just really tired from the busy day), so we left dinner early and took him home to get him to bed early. After being up most of the night with him coughing, crying, having a runny nose, fever, etc., I stayed home with him Sunday morning while Clay went to church. When Clay got back, I told him to come and look at Ethan's chest because he seemed to be breathing really hard. We got out the nebulizer and did a breathing treatment which did nothing to help him, but he would have spurts of about 30 minutes where he seemed fine. So, after 2 calls to the pediatrician and several "gut feelings" that something just wasn't right, we all 3 load up in the car and head to Cook Children's Hospital in Ft. Worth (which, by the way, I can't say enough good things about this place). We get there and I tell the lady that my son seems to be having trouble catching his breath, they take one look at him and send us right back to a room. (moral of this part of the story is that if you don't want to spend any time in the waiting room, tell the nurse you're having trouble breathing). They did a quick assessment and said he wasn't moving any air, so the respiratory therapist came by to do 3 back-to-back breathing treatments. While it was the longest 30 minutes of our lives, we saw some pretty immediate improvement. The steroids do very interesting things to a 17 month old, but thank goodness we had lots of things to make being confined to a hospital bed seem like fun. They took a chest x-ray and did blood work and came to the conclusion that it was some type of viral infection that was causing everything. After 2 hours of observation the doctor wasn't pleased with his breathing rate, so we did another treatment and stayed for further observation. But, after about 5 hours we were able to go home and kept doing treatments at home through the night.

Phew. I'm tired just writing about all of it, but it really could have been much worse. A follow-up visit to the pediatrician's office yesterday led us to believe that it was some type of allergic reaction...to what you ask? NO IDEA! Big surprise...we never know what causes him to have reactions, but hopefully he'll grow out of all of this.

Anyway, that was our exciting Easter Sunday, and today has been much better.