Isaac's first trip to the ER

Unfortunately, Isaac's hacky-cough did not go away. Oddly, it never really seems to bother him much -- he was just cheery, ambitious little Isaac most of the time, and then about once an hour he sounds like he was trying to hack up a lung. Then it was back to chasing cat-brother and trying to climb the stairs. Friday night, however, he started waking himself up with these thick, tuberculosis-sounding coughs. Seriously, if you as an adult had a cough that sounded like that, you would be at the doctor. But he had no fever and no wheezing, like the nurse said to watch for, so we persisted in our watchful waiting.

Saturday afternoon, Isaac was taking his inclined-nap on Dad when he woke himself up with a coughing spell again. Except this time, he couldn't catch a breath. Dad estimated that he went 10 seconds without air, turning an alarming shade of purple. Dad and I mobilized and rushed our little family to the car (minus cat-brother) for a trip to the ER. I think less than 4 minutes transpired between Isaac's color-turning and our arrival at the hospital. We briefly debated in the car -- should we take Isaac to the UW Med Center ER, where our insurance will pay 90%, but where Isaac will be waiting amid drunk people with bullet wounds, or should we take him to Children's Hospital, where there will be baby-friendly and -knowledgeable staff who have likely seen similar colds in recent memory, but where our insurance will only pay 50%? I think the choice is quite obvious. At Children's, we were seen by a pediatrician who herself had a 13-month-old boy, so unlike our other doctor's visits, there was no fussing or fighting because she knew just what to do. She also praised me highly for having breastfed my boy for 8 months with no supplemental formula whatsoever.

Her diagnosis is that he has some sort of upper-repiratory virus, which she guessed was probably RSV. RSV is an extremely common, extremely contagious virus that kids under 2 contract all the time. There's nothing you can do to treat it, and the only reason he would need to see a doctor is if he starts to wheeze, indicating his cold is turning into -- yay! -- bronchiolitis. She says that it's perfectly normal for babies to develop these kinds of colds during the winter, and often more than once in the same season -- yay again! One of the things a nurse there recommended to help him with his nighttime coughing fits is to have him sleep in his car seat. Here he is, starting out the night:

We also bought a humidifier that suggested it would be quiet and unobtrusive on the box, but is so loud you can't have a quiet conversation as long as it's in the room. Sigh.