Brielle's first sick trip to the doctor

Poor little Brielle.  Today, she is 4 months old, and today when she woke up she was crying because it was very hard for her to breathe.  Luckily, she slept through the night without too much trouble.  I heard her coughing a lot, but it never woke her.  This morning was a different story.  My happy little baby was miserable.  It was a sad thing to see.  It was a lot of work for her to breathe and she was taking very shallow breaths.  I took her into the steamy bathroom for a while, but that did not seem to help.

Then she got better for a while.  She was wheezing and you could tell it was a challenge for her to breathe, but she was doing ok.  She was happy and smiling and acting more like herself.  All was well for a while.  I talked to Natalie who made me feel better about not taking her in.  Then she started to get worse again, so I decided to call the doctor's office to see what they thought.  Well, they wouldn't pass on the message for a doctor to call back... apparently, just like with a fall, if you say the word wheeze, they want to see you immediately.  Sigh.  So I loaded up the troop (the sick troop) and we headed off to the train.  I'm getting better at carrying both Liam and Brielle and had to do that for about 4 blocks once Liam decided he was done walking.  Fun. :)

We saw the nurse practitioner, who was surprised to see how happy Brielle looked.  She said that Brielle is what they refer to as a "happy wheezer."  She listened to her lungs for a long time and said that despite the fact that she didn't look too awful, she was really bad.  She said her lungs sounded awful and even though I had initially said I didn't want any medicine for her, she said she really needed a nebulizer treatment.  Ok.  Try to imagine having to sit and hold a mask on a crying baby who doesn't want the mask on for 10 minutes while you have a 4 year old and 2 year old running around the room doing the following:  opening and closing the door and trying to escape, turning on and off the light (reached by pushing one of the chairs over to the switch), constantly dropping the expensive looking mouse, emptying out an entire container of those plastic things they put on top of the otoscope (ear flashlight thing) on the floor, opening and closing every single drawer in the place, constantly picking up the phone that is connected to the front desk, running around with the reflex hammer and fighting over the one iPad that mommy brought to distract them.  Sigh.  It was a horrible 10 minutes.  All in all, we were in that room for 90 minutes.  10 of those minutes were ok.  lol.

The NP came back in and said that Brielle sounded SO much better after the treatment..that her lungs had really opened up... and gave us a prescription for an inhaler for her (connected to a mask) that we have to give her every 4-6 hours for the next two days.  :(  My poor little baby!

Hope she gets better soon!  I'll be happy when this week is behind us!!!!!