Baby Jail

The day after Natalie's birthday, I had gone to the temple, and Garry was home with the kids. Carson had been sick the week before and passed it on the Natalie, plus she is working on 4 teeth, and I haven't completely ruled out that I think she might have allergies. We were just getting ready to call it a night, and Natalie was sleeping next to Garry on the couch. He tells me that he doesn't think she breathing normal. As I watch her, and then take her and hold her, I agree that her breathing was much too labored.

We decided to call the Drs. office, and were so relieved that our regular dr. was on call that night. She recommended giving her a breathing treatment, and if that didn't make things better within 15-20 min to go ahead and bring her to the emergency room. After her breathing treatment, I did not notice any difference, so we decided it would be best to bring her in. We dropped Carson off with Garry's parents, and we were off. Usually the ER is a nightmare to get right in, but apparently having a baby who is not breathing very well gets you right in, we only waited about 2 minutes before they brought us back.

We were not in our room too long when the ER dr. made it down, and they gave here a steroid, which luckily she got to drink instead of being poked. They gave her four breathing treatments, one every 15 minutes. We were also taken down to have a chest X-Ray taken. When all of those things were done, her oxygen levels were good, but she still had labored breathing, so they admitted her to the children's hospital......At 2:45 am.

We weren't really sure what they would do when we left for the hospital, and though I grabbed some extra pj's for Natalie, we really were not prepared to stay over night. But, you do what you have to do! We decided that I would stay at the hospital with Natalie, and Garry would go home to sleep ever so briefly. After much screaming, because she was exhausted, she finally slept! YAY!! And stayed asleep through all of her 2 hr. checks until about 8:30. We woke up and I fed her, and Garry got back to the hospital about 9. We had a visit from the new on-call dr. who told us she was uncomfortable letting us go home just yet, but we would see how things went through out the day. All signs were pointing toward a virus, but all the testing they could do would take at least 24 hours to process, so monitoring would be the best route at this point.

Her breathing continued to improve throughout the day, but her oxygen levels kept dropping while she was sleeping. She was really mellow, just cat-napping and being extremely restful for a 1 year old. I went home to take a shower, and when I got back, she was just casually laying on the bed gazing up at the respiratory therapist as he administered her breathing treatment.

Carson got to come visit for a little while, and was so cute, wanted to bring her a flower, but knew she wouldn't like real flowers, and so wanted to bring her a toy stuffed flower that she could play with, he asked the lady if he could have a card to go with it. He does prove to be most thoughtful sometimes.

After Natalie's afternoon nap, the dr. came back in. During her nap, her oxygen level had only dropped slightly, and she didn't have to have any supplemental oxygen. After consulting with the dr., and deciding if they would only be giving her breathing treatments at the hospital and that we could do that at home, we both decided the best scenario would be to go home! So ironically enough, they released us at the same time on the same day that we took her home from the hospital last year........How weird!

It was certainly not much of a way to spend her birthday weekend, but we were glad that we decided to play it safe this time.

Enjoy some of our pictures from her baby jail, poor baby!