Aidan's Urgent Care Visit

Friday, Aidan started a little rattle when he breathed - sort of a congestion-like sound. By Saturday morning, it was accompanied by a cough. I even had a conversation with mom about it while we were on the phone that morning. I'd told her if it was still like this Monday morning, I thought we'd need to bring him to the doctor. Then, that afternoon the little infant cough suddenly became like a seal-bark or a goose-honk.

I called his pediatrician right away and spoke to an after-hours nurse. It was frustrating, because she had questions about if he'd had lung problems before. Anyone who has read his Medical Log from the NICU days knows he has, but it's also not like he's been having lung trouble at home for the last four months. So I wanted to be truthful, but not alarmist. However, he also had a temp of 100 degrees.

She asked me to bring him to Accent Urgent Care, which specializes in pediatrics. From there, she said they may want me to go to the Emergency Room. At the Urgent Care, they brought him right into triage. They had to use several different machines before they got what they thought was a reliable oxygen saturation percentage. This is another number we tracked daily in the NICU, and was what kept him from being released for so long. Needless to say, it brought up all kinds of bad memories. The first machines were showing percents in the eighties, which used to be accompanied with alarms back in the day.

They finally got a read in the mid-nineties. After listening to him and hearing the cough, I held him while they gave him two treatments of albuterol on a nebulizer. They said if he continued or got any worse, to go right to the Emergency Room.

They believe it to be croup and/or bronchiolitis. We now have our own nebulizer which gives him his albuterol every four hours and he takes an oral steroid twice a day called prednisolone. Corey will bring him to see the doctor tomorrow (Monday). A doctor from his Pediatric Group was supposed to call and check on him today (since there was no one for us to call today, as it's Easter Sunday) but he never did. Fortunately, he seems to be doing better today and he'd slept okay last night. We've brought him back into our room just to monitor more closely.

Oh yeah, we also learned at this appointment that he's now 18 pounds. Obviously that's NOT in the headlines or the cover story, but just fyi.

Here's our brave little guy getting a nebulizer treatment: