Up All Night

So no matter how many hand washings, body scrubbings, clothing changes, hand sanitizers we do, our baby still caught a nasty virus. We took Noah to the doctor at the first sign of a cough, that was on a Tuesday and the doc said he was fine, lungs clear, no problems.
By Friday, we have a barking baby who sounds like he's going to cough up a toenail...Back to the doctor we go and the diagnosis is bronchiolitis. The doc gave us a breathing machine, a prescription for albuterol and sent us on our way. Ten breathing treatments, suctioned noses and many steamy bathrooms later, our baby was not improving.
It's Saturday night and we debated what to do. Our little guy was miserable and doing everything he could in his tiny body to supress the cough. We finally called the pediatrician's office again and got on the line with the on-call nurse who told us to go to Phoenix Children's Hospital. We debated some more, monitored the cough and finally gave in and went to the ER around 11pm.
I wanted to turn around as soon as we walked into the room of whimpering children and exhausted moms and dads. Luckily we had the youngest patient so they put us in a private room where we were able to stay the whole time. They monitored his breathing for several hours and he was checked out by a physician and a respiratory specialist. The specialist took a very tiny tube and put it in Noah's nose, it seemed she was feeding it in there forever. Then the horror started. She suctioned his whole sinus area until he could breathe again. We were nervous moms holding onto him, I am certain I cried harder than he did - What relief when it was done. Noah felt so much better, you could see it on his face. They did the suctioning three times while we were there before we could bring him home. We were told again that he had a virus and it could last several weeks.
We finally arrived back home around 3am and all of us slept soundly until noon the next day. Noah is doing much better now and we are glad to be over this first baby milestone.