Degrees of heat

There are times that being a parent is scary to me.  I don't mean that in a funny way, scary as in "ha ha, this kid is my mother's revenge."  I mean scary in the way that makes my pulse race, a way that makes my mind snap into that automatic mode that is never far away, a product of my days working in the hospital.  Those days I roll over  instantly awake, assesing breathing patterns, pulse, skin tone, lethargy and a million other variable in the time it takes me to say to my husband (in a carefully neutral tone) "Let me take a look at Sam.  Come here, sweetheart."

The week before last, we had too many of those days.  Sam developed a small fever before bed one day so we dosed him with Motrin and put him down to sleep as usual.  In the middle of the night I awoke to Jeff's hand on my shoulder.  He was standing at the side of the bed, Sam in his arms, asking me "At what number is a fever dangerous?  Can you look at Sam?  He's really hot."  Hot he was, burning up in fact, his temperature at 104.8 F.  "It's okay" I soothed, stripping off his sleeper, even though it was anything but.  We dosed him again with Motrin, sat him in a cool bath for as long as he would stand it and dressed him in the lightest short-sleeved onesie we had before I rocked him back to sleep.  In the morning his fever was back down and we breathed a sigh of relief.  Jeff and I were exhausted from being up all night but more exhausted from the worry that accompanies a sick child, especially OUR sick child.  Our dearly loved, hard-won, much-sought and only child.

We took him to the doctor and she pronounced him on the right side of a virus, on his way up.  She noted his nose looked a little stuffed and told us that if his fever rose again we were to admit him to the hospital right away.  This seemed strange to me at the time; normally they keep you home for fevers under 105.  We'd called the emergency line the night before and their advice to us had reflected that paradigm.  Later that week, however, we read two separate blogs, tertiary friends of mine, whose children had died of respiratory complications, one of them involving a high fever.  I found out much later that this has been a bad year; my friends are not the only ones who've lost their babies.  Many kids are severly sick.

When Sam's nose started to run in the next few days I didn't pay much attention to it because I remembered that Dr. C noted it had been stuffed.  I thought it was the end of the virus clearing out.  A few days later his chest began to rattle and he started to wheeze and I knew it wasn't the end of anything but rather the beginning.  Jeff woke me up again in the middle of the night to ask me if Sam looked like he was retracting (a breathing issue that can signal severe distress.)  Thankfully he wasn't but I was glad we had an appointment to see Dr. C. the next day all the same.  My gut told me not to let him try to fight this one on his own.   Back to the doctor we went and she grimly told us that Sam had bronchiolitis yet again, his third or fourth time this winter.  She placed him back on Amoxil for the infection and Albuterol nebulizer treatments to help his breathing.  She told me that Sam's lungs seem peculiarly susceptible to infection and because of that she was adding a new medication: Pulmicort.  We were to infuse it with the nebulizer twice a day for four weeks.

Pulmicort was a big deal to me and still is.  It's an asthma medication routinely given to children over six years of age but rarely given to babies.  The only time I've ever seen it used for babies is when a pulmonary problem exists, such as in preemies whose immature lungs need support during their first years of life.  And now Sam is on this drug and I find myself watching him closely, looking for signs of...what?  I'm not sure.  He seems fully recovered from his bronchiolitis.  He managed to pass it on to me before he was done and I turned it into a sinus infection.  (Who knows what Jeff will do with it?)  His lungs seem okay for now.  I'm hoping that the Pulmicort will buy us some time, get us through the last of this unnaturally cold and wet spring into the dry heat of summer.  Maybe by the end of a long, dry summer Sam's lungs will be strong enough to face the fall without threat of constant infection.

Until then, I'm wishing for boring nights with no racing pulse.