The pediatric team called me when they got my email concerning Allie’s current symptoms. They told me to bring her in to be re-seen given that it’s been over a week of her symptoms and she’s gotten worse. We saw a pediatrician we hadn’t met before, but she was also very nice. Listening to the “whistling” in Allie’s lungs, she narrowed the virus down to two, and they’re both bad news. They’re very hard on the lungs and they’ve already gotten other babies hospitalized because they couldn’t breathe well through the sickness. The doctor said that considering what Allie has, she’s doing well with it, so I must be giving her good antibodies in the breastmilk and made her strong.
She showed us how to use the nasal bulb aspirator, and demonstrated how to squirt saline in each nostril before suctioning them. She used a lot more saline than I thought I could; she squirted from a disposable pack, more than the 1-2 drops I’d read I was to be using. Then she suctioned pretty much how we’d done it, and also brought out almost nothing. The mucus is likely farther back. So to help her breathe better, the doctor had us use a nebulizer, which is a machine that turns the saline into vapor, which is then delivered through a little gas mask. The doctor told us to hold the baby with the mask in front of her face, not attached, for the 15-20 minutes it took to vaporize the small package of saline.

After the treatment, the doctor returned to listen to Allie’s lungs again, and said it sounded better. So she sent us home with our own nebulizer machine, a giant box of individual saline packages, extra masks, tubing and accessories, and all we had to pay was the $5 copay for the prescription saline.
Allie was a trooper. Even though she was being tortured, she still cooed at the doctor and smiled at her. The doctor was charmed. “You’re still speaking to me, after I tortured you? And you’re smiling at me now, too?”

I kept thinking I was avoiding the worst of this bug, considering how miserable Mr. W was when he had it. I had a touch of tonsillitis last Wednesday, got the sniffles for 2 days after, and I thought that was it. But then the sneezing and coughing set in. And now my throat feels raw, I’m still coughing, and this evening I felt like there was compression against my chest, making it hard for me to breathe. If this is what Allie went through and she still smiles and coos and sings along with me, then she has a very high tolerance for pain and an amazing disposition. Even after a coughing fit that has her gasping and wheezing for breath, she returns immediately to her old self, eyes red from the strain, as if there were never that interruption to whatever she was doing.

She slept better today, going down for hours each nap. Because she skipped the last nap from being at the doctor’s, she went to bed early (fed her at 7p, she was asleep by 8p) and is sleeping now.

*** ADDENDUM 2/15/12
I just checked Allie’s past-visit information online on the Kaiser website. The current diagnosis is upper respiratory infection, plus bronchiolitis. I looked up bronchiolitis and all sorts of stuff about RSV virus came up, so that’s probably what she has.