Ben's trip to the Emergency Room

Well, we knew it would happen sooner or later... poor Bennie got sick late last week with a general run-of-the-mill cold and just had a slight cough on Thursday & Friday. On Saturday morning, the 3 of us went down to my aunt & uncles in Los Angeles to hang with family and spend the night - everything with Ben continued to be pretty status quo. We had a great time with our cousins & their families and got up on Sunday morning with the usual plan of going to church (my uncle is a minister of a large church in Whittier, CA), having lunch and then heading back to Santa Barbara (after a Target stop, of course) :) Anyway, Ben woke up very wheezy and not feeling well at all - coughing, sneezing and wheezing. Not a good combo. Being that my aunt is a nurse, she listened to his lungs & suggested we hit the road. I called Ben's pediatrician and he thought it sounded relatively mild (I"m sure based on what he sees, but it didn't feel mild). So, we headed back to SB right away to make sure we were close to home. By about 5, he was really sounding much worse, so we made the decision to take him to the ER. (Not really knowing if we were over reacting, but knowing that everything is much scarier in the middle of the night & we just knew that this was not feeling right).

We entered the ER at 5:30 and exited it at 10 pm. Wow... what a wild ride. They immediately paged the pediatric respiratory therapist so Ben got a breathing treatment and then we hung out and waited for the ER doc (and waited... and waited... and waited...) Finally, they confirmed by testing his snot that it was RSV. Basically a virus that gets into babies body and reaks havoc. It is basically a bad cold. They gave him another treatment before we left & sent us home with a "baby inhaler". Basically an inhaler with a little mask on it to help him breathe better. Soooo, we got him home after a long 4.5 hours, got the humidifier going and got him to bed. Poor guy. He's much better today ~ he's eating more & his wheezing is considerably less. We're sucking the snot out of his nose (which he hates) and giving him lots of TLC (which he loves)!

Thank God for Emergency Medicine! :) Of course I had my camera with , so here's a few pictures of our baby boy in the hospital. Back to where it all started... just on a different floor. Hopefully we won't be seeing that building again for a long time. By the way -- this was the only smile we got out of Ben the entire night... it was really hard on him and he was not our normal smiling boy, but Steve squeaked a few out here!