Little Pink Elephant

So far, Olivia is our emergency room child. I'm not sure that every family has one, and I feel badly for those who have more than one. It's a little disconcerting when you're trying to decide what to do with your child and "call 911" is one of the options; but that's what we did last night. Liv woke us up around 1:00AM coughing and unable to breathe. After trying to calm her down ourselves, Tricia called emergency dispatch and they sent out the EMTs. And a couple firemen. And a police officer. At 1:15 in the morning. The lovely dispatch girl kept Tricia occupied on the phone while I calmed Liv down enough to get her breathing a little bit.

After the EMTs checked her out they thought that it was probably Croup, and said we needed to get her to the hospital for some breathing treatment. They kindly offered to take her for us, but also suggested that we might just want to take her ourselves and save some money. So Liv and I headed off for her third trip to the emergency room. (Luckily for me, it's been long enough since our last visit that I wasn't getting the stink-eye again, and questions about whether or not they needed to call social services. Like last time we were there...)

When we got there, we did the old "tell us what's happening" routine and were quickly led into a nice quiet room (ER was empty for a change). After checking her out, the doctor thought it might not be Croup after all, as Livi was missing one of the tell-tale signs: inspiratory stridor (I had to look that up on the interwebz--I thought the doctor was saying she didn't have Strider, whatever that was supposed to mean). That's the loudish wheezing sound kids with Croup usually make while inhaling. Anyway, he thought she might have bronchitis, so they had her do some breathing treatment with Albuterol. When that didn't seem to help much, they gave her a shot of steroids (she was very brave), took a couple x-rays, and finally did a second breathing treatment, this time with racemic epinephrine (commonly used to treat Croup). That did the trick. The nurse warned me that in children, the epinephrine usually causes some hyper-activity, but was surprised when Liv fell right to sleep once her breathing started to come a little easier.

The sleep was short-lived though, and Liv was shortly wide awake and ready to go home. The doctors needed to keep us there for a couple of hours to monitor her response to the epinephrine after its effects wore off, so hyper Livi and I tried to keep ourselves occupied for the next three hours. Liv did it by coloring a very nice picture/card for her nurse Julie (I wish I had snapped a picture of that before she gave it away) and reading a Ranger Rick magazine from 1991 (I think the ER could use an updated subscription). Julie made the fatal error of giving Liv the "call" button and telling her to push it if she needed anything. Liv spent the next hour pushing the button every five minutes.

Finally, at around 5:00, the epinephrine started to wear off and Liv fell asleep. A few minutes later the doctor came back to check on her and said she would be fine to go home. Her breathing and heart rate were back in good ranges, and she was getting plenty of oxygen. They walked me through the packet of stuff they gave me (prescription, instructions for treating Liv at home, etc...) and we came home, arriving just before 6:00AM. The last thing Liv said to me was to make sure her alarm was set so that she could wake up for school (in twenty minutes). I let Tricia handle the horrible duty of explaining that there would be no school today, which was probably the worst thing to happen all night.

PS--I guess I could explain the title of the post. When Livi was doing her breathing treatments (see the picture at the top), we joked around that she looked like a little pink elephant. She would try to make elephant noises and blow the mist at me. She really was a trooper.