My First Mother's Day

My first Mother's Day was quite adventurous.  Derek was fishing in North Carolina with his family and was planning on getting home in the late afternoon, so it had been just me and Elliot since mid morning on Friday.  We had had a pretty good weekend together, but El's cough had been getting worse and was now "wet" instead of dry.  Late Saturday he had started wheezing every once in a while, but was still acting fairly normal.  Sunday Elliot slept all through sacrament meeting - it was awesome!  He woke up as the closing prayer was ending, very good timing, and immediately started coughing his head off!  Poor guy.  I took him home, where he kept getting worse and worse.  Derek got home at about 4pm.  I had just taken Elliot's temperature as he was getting home and it was 102!  It was way too high.  I gave him some tylenol and we took his temperature an hour later.  It hadn't gotten worse, and had actually gone up a couple tenths of a degree.  We gave him another hour to see if the fever would lower, but during that hour his wheezing and cough got worse, so we decided to take him to the hospital.  We were worried by that point that it was pneumonia because of the wheezing.  Derek gave him a blessing and we left for the hospital at about 6:30pm.

We arrived at the hospital and had no idea where to go.  Luckily we ran into a nurse who was coming on her shift and she walked us straight over to the pediatric unit, where we were immediately seen.  The nurse took our explanation of what was going on, took El's temperature (which was much better by that time, thank goodness), his O2 levels, weight, and all that jazz.  We were seen by the doctor, who said it sounded like bronchiolitis, but she wanted to make sure it wasn't pneumonia or RSV.  My poor Elliot had two chest x-rays, a breathing treatment, and a nasal swab done while we were there.  The breathing treatment didn't help, and we were quite relieved to hear that it was not pneumonia or RSV.  Unfortunately for us, though, bronchiolitis is viral (similar to bronchitis), so there wasn't much we could do for him that we weren't already doing.  It just has to run its course, but the doctor was happy we had brought him in since he is still so little and these things can get serious pretty fast.

We were at the hospital for about 3 hours and Elliot finally fell asleep right as we were checking out at about 10pm.  The little guy slept about 5 hours straight, which was his longest stretch in about a week.  He was really wiped out from all the tests and especially from the coughing!

So that was my first Mother's Day.  Derek was great and got me a nice card and a cool plant before he left.  My family sent me an edible arrangement that was delicious!  Overall it wasn't what I expected, but I'm so glad that I'm a mom to my little cutie!