Start of Summer Vacation- ER visit

The night before we were to leave for our annual Blakeslee family reunion/vacation, Lexi and I spent the night in the ER. I went in to check on the babies before I went to bed, like usual, around 11:00 p.m. I could tell that someone had pooped by the smell in the room. Upon inspection, I found it was both of them (awesome) but got Lexi up first to change her. I could tell right away, even in her groggy state, that she was breathing really funny. Her breathing was labored and she was struggling and her voice was raspy. I called Ben in immediately and we could both tell something was wrong but didn't know how serious it was. I changed her and then laid her back down and she immediately started crying and that made her sound 20 times worse. Her cry/voice was a bark and she sounded like she couldn't breathe at all. It was quite startling and we decided to take her into the ER to be safe. I would have been a nervous wreck all night not knowing if she was breathing or not.

So around 11:45 pm, Lexi and I headed in to the ER, while Ben stayed home with the rest of the kids.

We got checked in and into a bed around 1:00 a.m. They sent a respiratory therapist in right away and she did a breathing treatment on Lexi immediately. Lexi did not like that, but it started to help her breathing immediately. They told me she had croup, which is viral so she would not be put on antibiotics.

Then came the waiting.... oh, the waiting. I hate the ER. All the waiting.

Even though it was 2:00 a.m., Lexi was wide awake due to the breathing treatments. They make you jittery, which does not aid in relaxing. She was all over the place for a few hours and got very silly.

Cheese!

Who should we call at 2:00 in the morning?

They finally did another breathing treatment around 2:30 or so which Lexi SCREAMED through and yelled "No! No!" Poor baby. But it helped even more. Then more and more waiting. We were not told until the end that with these breathing treatments and with the liquid steroids that they gave her (to help open up her airway), children need to be monitored for 4 hours after. Since they didn't tell us this, we sat in that bed not knowing what we were waiting for. I finally paged someone and the nurse showed up in our room, sounding quite irritated, and asked what we needed. I was exhausted and Lexi was too and she was so jittery and couldn't calm her body down. Luckily, Lexi cleared up so well that they released us just 2 hours after the last treatment and we didn't have to wait the full 4 hours.

Ironically, she finally fell asleep just minutes before we were discharged. What a long night! We didn't get home until 4:30 a.m. With early risers, I was up by 7:30 a.m. and Ben had to leave to work by 5:00 a.m. so both of us got just 3 hours of sleep. What a great way to start off vacation- little sleep and a sick baby.