Time for the Whaaaambulance

Sunday, September 19th started out as a great day. Ella's cousins were in town and we all went to see Disney on Ice. Even Dad thought it was a pretty good show. Many of the attendees were dressed up as princesses, which was cute. Ella behaved really well, even though she was still fighting the croup over the last two weeks. When we got Ella ready for bed, we noticed that she seamed to be wheezing a little with each breath. We chalked it up to her being a tired from the day's activities. However, things did not improve with rest, and in fact grew worse. Finally, around 9 pm, we called our after hours pediatric nurses. We were connected to a nurse, who asked us to hold the phone near Ella so she could hear the breathing. The news panicked us. The nurse thought that Ella sounded like she was in respiratory distress, and that we should call 911. While I was concerned, I asked if 911 was really necessary. The nurse responded that newborns can tire very quickly during respiratory distress and just give up. So 911 it was. The Affton fire department responded nobly and was there in mere minutes. After determining Ella was stable enough for transport, Mom hopped into the ambulance and Dad followed by car. During the ambulance ride, Ella was so distracted that her breathing actually got better. When we checked her into Children's (it was closer than St. Johns), we found out she also had a fever of 102.5degrees. She was given some Tylenol. Then, since she was breathing ok and we were in the ER, we got to play the waiting game. Ella was downgraded to non-emergency, which meant 3 hours in the waiting room before we got to see a doctor. At this point, Ella's fever had dropped and breathing was about normal. Still, we wanted to rule out pneumonia, so Ella had a chest x-ray done. When that came back clean, the Doctors wanted to rule out a urinary track infection (they were mystified why she had a fever when she was already on antibiotics for the croup). That came back fine, but we will spare our readers the painful way they obtained the urine sample. You just can't tell an infant to go pee in a cup.

With a peacefully sleeping baby and two very tired parents, we were finally discharged around 3am and told to go home and observe. "Observing" must have worked, because Ella recovered over the next few days and was back to her normal happy self in no time.

Paranoid first time parents, I suppose, although better to be safe than sorry.