A reminder on why we need to be careful during RSV season

This has been on my mind a lot and for many different reasons. The pictures are of James in the PICU I will warn you know in case you don't want to see them, but I need to put this out there so that maybe my mind will let me have some rest. Sometimes I think it is just natural for us to think that could never happen to me or my family or we take to many precautions for it to happen to us. Well back when James was a newborn Braden had a runny nose at the same time he was teething so we didn't think to much about it. He didn't act sick he didn't look sick he looked like a 15 month old who was teething. Well December 31 2007 James started acting more tired he wasn't eating as much on New Years day 2008 he quit eating completely we were on the phone with the on call doctor all day being told not to worry and to discuss it with our doctor the next day (when it wasn't a holiday). After much debating with ourselves and lots of praying with the help of our parents we decided to ignore the doctor and take him to Primary Childrens Medical Center and boy am I grateful for a mother in law who insisted we do this. We called the hospital to let them know we were coming and why we told them James was 18 days old, was not eating and had not eaten in almost 24 hours, his skin had taken a gray almost blue look to it (which we later learned was from lack of Oxygen.) As we arrived they took one look at him and rushed him back to the ER if I had not kept up I would have been left in the Hallway we were informed had we waited until the next day (as we were told to) we would have probably been planning a funeral. James was diagnosed with RSV, Bronchitis and Pneumonia and then spent the next month in the PICU with breathing tubes feeding tubes and many other IV's for medicines and monitoring on him. He was kept asleep for most of that month. Why am I telling everyone this almost 2 years later? Well because RSV season is coming upon us, on top of that we now have to worry about swine flu and other things our kids or ourselves could catch. I want us all to remember why it is important to be careful and to take the precautions of not spreading these diseases and to not put ourselves in the position to even catch them. I know that sometimes it just happens trust me I KNOW we thought our older son was just teething but came to find out he also had RSV/ bronchitis. Don't be afraid to call your doctor even if you think it is just the sniffles it's there job to help you know if your child is healthy. As my great doctor says "I would rather get a question and have it be nothing then to have it be something and the parents not know until it is to late." So please just remember lets be careful there's a lot of crap going around. For those who might be wondering what some of the symptoms of RSV/Bronchitis are in older children it's just cold like symptoms that affect them the same as a normal cold.

In younger children, especially infants and toddlers, RSV can affect their lungs, causing bronchiolitis or pneumonia.(Both of which James had) These children can develop more severe symptoms after about 2 to 4 days of having regular cold symptoms and after their fever may have gone away, including:

• irritability and poor feeding
• lethargy
• worsening cough
• difficulty breathing, with retractions and nasal flaring
• fast breathing
• wheezing
• hypoxemia (low oxygen levels), although cyanosis, is not common(we learned that a sign of this is a gray or bluish tint of skin)
  
• apnea, although this is most common in infants under 6 weeks of age

P.S. I know these pictures are hard to look at but it gets the point across. You should try being the mother who is sitting here with tears streaming down her face as she remembers the whole ordeal. I would not wish this upon my worst enemy.