Parker Week 12 – RSV arrives
April 14, 2009
As most parents of babies and toddlers can tell you, kids get colds – a lot. One variety of cold that most kids get is RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus). For most kids, this is usually just a bad cold – stuffy nose, cough, fever, sometimes an ear infection. In other babies, like mine, this can cause difficulty breathing.
Last Tuesday I brought Parker to see the pediatrician. He had been sent home early from day care on Monday with his cold. By Tuesday morning he was wheezing and having a little trouble breathing. The earliest appointment available was 10:40. We were there for over an hour, and it turned out that Parker tested positive for RSV. We gave him some Albuterol in a nebulizer at the office and that seemed to help. This was a good sign, because if the nebulizer hadn’t worked, he would have been admitted to the hospital.
Generally, our doctor’s office has nine nebulizers available to loan out to patients. Unfortunately for us, all nine were missing that day. So, we purchased a nebulizer (luckily, they aren’t too expensive, $40.00). We began giving Parker nebulizer treatments every 4 hours and continued giving him acetaminophen to help with his low grade fever.
The doctor told me to use my best judgment on how the nebulizer was working. If Parker continued to wheeze after a treatment, then I was supposed to call and bring him back to the office, at which point they would likely admit him to the hospital. Naturally, this made me extra nervous – what if I judged wrong? It felt like with every breath Parker took I was trying to evaluate him – was that a wheeze? Is he exerting too much effort in taking a breath? His breaths are fast and short, but are they too fast or too short?
To add to the stress, last week was my final week working for the Learning Commons at PSU. This week I started working for the Advancement Office. So, I was working as hard as I could to get things wrapped up and finished before I left the Learning Commons. This was especially difficult when I had to keep leaving work to pick up sick kids. Zach also had several important meetings, so the two of us negotiated for time (I can push my 2:30 meeting to the morning and take the afternoon off, if you can skip your morning meeting and stay home, etc.)
It all worked out in the end. Zach and I both managed to get everything done at work that needed to be done. Parker spent a few days home with us before returning to day care, and after this weekend, we no longer needed to use the nebulizer, and we didn’t have to visit the hospital (whew!)
The only thing left to worry about is my grandmother remaining healthy. At 96, she is very susceptible to RSV and it can develop into scarier illnesses such as pneumonia for her. We tried to keep the kids at a distance during our Easter dinner, but RSV is very contagious. It will be so sad if she does get sick and we know that one of my kids infected her. On the other hand, she would have been very disappointed to miss them on Easter as well. So we’re keeping our fingers crossed that everything turns out ok.
RSV was a rather stressful and scary experience at times. Luckily, we all survived with just a few less hours of sleep and things could have of course been much, much worse.
Like many mommy bloggers this week, my thoughts keep cycling back to Maddie and Thalon and their families. I couldn’t begin to write about these losses as eloquently as the rest of the mommy blogging community, but I do feel the same heart-wrenching sympathy for the families and at the same time overwhelming relief/guilt that my family is alive and healthy. Losses like Thalon and Maddie force me to remember that even on the hardest most difficult days, I have kids who are healthy and happy and I am in awe of my good fortune.
That elusive first smile started to make an appearance this week! For the most part, Parker continues to maintain that puzzled or slightly annoyed expression, but once in a while, if you say the right thing, or look the right way, he will reward you with the cutest, biggest open mouth smile you have ever seen. Of course, this smile is so elusive that we have yet to catch it on camera, but we’ll keep trying. One of these days I’m sure we’ll trick him into smiling for the camera 
