Croup: Season 3, Round 1

At 3:07 this morning, after feeding Sam, I turned down the volume on the baby monitor that allows us to listen into Elijah's room. I did this as a preventative measure to keep Elijah's early-morning babbling (that usually starts around 6:00) from waking up Sam, who still sleeps in our room with us. The only reason we still have a monitor in Elijah's room is because we need to be able to hear when he has croup. So at 3:07, after patting myself on the back for thinking to turn the monitor down ahead of time, I had the thought, "He rarely gets croup after 3:00, so we should be in the safe zone." Croup usually happens (for Elijah) between the hours of 9:00 pm and 2:00 am.

An hour and a half later, I heard my least favorite noise in the world: my little boy gasping for air. (At least now we know we can still hear croup when the monitor is turned down low!) I yelled "CROUP!" to Dan and he yelled "I HEARD!" back, as we simultaneously bounced out of bed in a frantic panic to do our croup routine.

I try not to use the H word very often, but I truly, genuinely, totally, completely, wholeheartedly HATE croup. And Elijah doesn't just get a pesky little barky cough type of croup. He gets the full-on, struggling for each breath type that freaks this mama out. As I squeezed his medication into the nebulizer, my hands were shaking so badly that I was having a hard time getting the liquid where it was supposed to go.

CROUP, I HATE YOU!

Elijah fought having the nebulizer mask on his face, as usual, and that did not help the situation. It took a good 5-10 minutes for Dan and me to get him to calm down a bit. After the neb was finished, he was able to breathe much more easily. We gave him a dose of oral steroids and went back to bed. Except, we didn't sleep because I had to get up for work shortly after that and Sam decided to start screaming because he was missing out on all the fun.

A couple positive thoughts..

Croup usually makes its first appearance for the season in August, so I guess it's a nice little treat that it waited until September to pay us a visit.

I am extremely thankful for the magic nebulizer medication that helps our little boy to breathe! Racemic epinephrine is normally only available in hospitals, so we are incredibly lucky that Elijah's pulmonologist gives us a supply of our own to keep on hand. This medication has saved us many ambulance rides and/or trips to the ER in the middle of the night.

I brought Elijah to bed with us after this croup ordeal because I was shaken up and I just wanted to be close to him. This was the first time I have ever attempted to have him sleep in bed with us, so he didn't understand that he was supposed to sleep. He kept talking about random things: "Buy two umbrellas at Target!" "Go to Fair!" "Wear green crocs!" At one point I sneezed and he said, "Bwess you, Mom!" and then reached his little hand over and rubbed my head. :) So sweet. After a few minutes of the chattering and non-sleeping, I put him back into his own bed. It was nice to have him next to me, but it is also nice to sleep (which never happened, by the way)!

On an unrelated, yet still positive, note, we made it to the State Fair yesterday! It was Sam's first time and Elijah's fifth (including when he was in my belly). More on that to come. I took approximately five billion photos.