whooping cough.

We took our sweet baby into the ER on June 22nd.  She had a horrible coughing fit at about 11pm that night that scared us half to death.  She was coughing so hard and was struggling to breathe.  And she was turning purple.  She had had a bad cough for a couple of weeks, and we had gone to the Dr. a couple of times (both times they said she was fine - it was just a cold).  But it had gotten worse that day and then that night it scared us so bad we had to take her in.  We both knew we had to.  We suspected she might have whooping cough, and it turns out that she did.  (I didn't even know that whooping cough was still around, but I guess it has made a resurgence in the past several years.)

The Dr. wanted to monitor her in the hospital for a little while and make sure that she was getting through the coughing spells ok.  They wanted to make sure there were no signs of apnea.  They hooked her up to a monitor where it kept track of how long she held her breath while coughing...if she held it for longer than 20 seconds then they would be worried about the apnea.  They watched her from when we got there Friday night (at around midnight) until Sunday morning, when we were released.

I was pretty scared at first.  When you read up on whooping cough it doesn't look good...especially for babies who haven't had all of their vaccines.  She had only had one of the five shots she's supposed to get her first year for whooping cough.  They said there really wasn't anything they could do to make it better, which was tough to hear.  I just wanted them to make her all better so that she didn't have to endure the horrible coughing fits anymore.  They did start her on a antibiotic, which would make her not contagious anymore.  Sometimes the antibiotic can also make the symptoms go away, but since she had been coughing for two weeks already it was too late for it to really make much of a difference.  They said that she was probably at the peak of the coughing attacks and that they would start to subside (a nickname for whooping cough is the "100 day cough"...it can linger for a longggg time).  It was so hard for me to watch her cough so hard.  There were times that she just couldn't seem to get her breath, and then when she would turn purple it about made me have a heart attack.  It was crazy though...other than her cough she was her normal, happy self.  If she wasn't having one of her coughing fits, you never would of known what was wrong.  It felt silly being in the hospital with such a happy baby, but yet we were glad they were monitoring her for awhile.