Warthog Flu. With Tusks.

Something new seems to have swept through our family in the wake of last week's illness.  Or perhaps it's a continuation.  It's hard to tell.  We thought for a couple of days that it might be the swine flu -- it had all the classic earmarks:  sudden onset of high fever, respiratory distress, extreme tiredness....  Benjamin and Jonathan both had it; mysteriously, Timothy (who can get sick from just looking at a picture of a rainy day) seemed perfectly healthy.  Jonathan 'only' had 102-103 fever and chest pains.  But it was Benjamin who really worried me.  He woke up Thursday morning (the day I had planned to send him to school) with 102 fever and labored breathing, both of which continued intermittently all day.

By Friday morning, we were well ready to take him to a doctor, even at the risk of infecting people at the doctor's office with whatever it was he had.  Dr. Herrera took one look at him, gathered up his stethoscope and said, "We're moving.  I have to admit him to the emergency room."

Apparently, he was worse off than even we suspected.  I think that when you see an ER doctor go pale and the orderlies break into a run of their own accord, things are bad.  Everybody in the ER went pale started running when Benjamin got there.

Diagnosis:  Croup caused by some (as yet) unknown virus.  But croup that had come within 1/8 inch of completely closing off his airway.

So, I'm blogging at the moment from his hospital room.  We spent last night here and will spend at least tonight here, and frankly, I'd be glad with a 3rd night because this virus he has makes him sick for two days, gives him two days off, and then resurfaces.

Today is a 'day off.'  He has no fever; he's breathing AND talking today and quite cheerful.  They took him off the IV at lunch and reduced his oxygen and inhaled medicine to a minimal amount.  He's eating like a horse and starting to get bored.

I am starting to get psychotic.  Knowing that he seems to be heading straight out of the woods has given me the leisure to become grumpy about other things.  Things like:  in a hospital, where you go to get well, it is IMPOSSIBLE to get any type of quality sleep.  Between 8 p.m. last night and 5 a.m. this morning, we averaged about 30 minutes of sleep per hour in the face of malfunctioning equipment (resulting in klaxon alarms sounding repeatedly in my ear.  Once it was because the IV machine battery had run down and it needed to be plugged in.  Took two nurses to diagnose that problem.  Sigh.); interruptions at shift change; the obligatory medicine and temperature interruptions; and someone delivering the NEWSPAPER at 6 a.m!

There's no way for the nurse's station to hear the alarms and malfunctioning equipment, which means that I spent a good deal of the night shuffling down the hall barefoot in my pajamas, bed hair sticking out into several dimensions, trying to think how to say in Spanish that the IV machine is malfunctioning.  Again.  And wondering if I'll be able to understand their response.

So, you can see that if I'm complaining about such petty things, Benjamin is really doing better.

But, when I thought it was the swine flu, and I was listening to him struggle for every breath, I remember thinking:  if ONLY we'd been able to get that vaccination.  I don't know where you stand on the H1N1 vaccination, but this particular scare has left me in no doubt.  It is scary to not know if your child will ever take another breath.  Literally.  And if it comes down to a question of wondering whether this will, literally, be your kid's last breath, you want to know, whatever happens, that you did everything you could to make sure he'd keep breathing.

So that, from a formerly-panicked mom is my plug for getting the swine flu vaccine.