We had quite a scare. Poor Mason has had a cold for about four days--the same cold that all the other kids had had over the last couple of weeks. It didn't seem to be any worse than usual--until Tuesday. After an unusually long nap (I had to wake him up after four hours) I went into his room and saw his little chest just heaving up and down. I picked him up and carried him out to the family room, where I laid him down so I could get the phone, the thermometer, and some medicine. He was totally lethargic, and didn't even respond when I laid him down. I packed up the kids and drove to the Urgent Care clinic. They took one look at him and sent us across the street to the Emergency Room. We didn't even have time to sit down at the ER before they rushed us back to a room where about 6-8 people immediately rushed to work on him--putting him on oxygen, starting an IV, drawing blood samples, taking X-rays, etc. His room was pretty frantic--unlike anything I've ever experienced in the ER before, where usually you wait hours to even see a doctor. Within 20 minutes, they told me he had pneumonia and they were going to be transfering him by ambulance to the Children's Hospital at St. Luke's in Boise. There he spent just over 24 hours in the ICU, and then another four days in the Pediatric unit. He received excellent care there, and was such a trooper the whole time.
It wasn't until we were settled in the ICU that I learned the reason for the near-panicked frenzy back in the ER. A nurse informed me that, since Mason was breathing 120 times a minute--more than three times the normal rate for his age--they were worried that he was going to wear himself out and just suddenly give up and stop breathing. She said that is the risk when babies are working that hard to breathe--they just simply give up, without warning. Thank heavens Mason didn't give up.
