Bottom Five

I suppose we shouldn’t have expected a nice straight line of progress. Like at no point should we expect that. Mrs. J never expects it, but I’m an eternal optimist. I can’t help myself.

No, the best we should hope for is two steps forward and one step back. And that’s what we’ve gotten.

So here’s the step back:

Sometime in the past few days, Gus started sounding congested. For most babies, that probably means he’s got a cold. For Gus, it might mean that, or it might mean he’s aspirating his formula*.

Last night, we listend as the congested sound got progressively worse. We discussed, in our sleepy haze, what we ought to do. Mrs. J decided it was bad enough that we really ought to take the baby to the emergency room, just to make sure. If it weren’t Easter morning, we’d have gone to our pediatrician. Or our surgeon. Or our GI specialist. Or something.

I think we’re both are worried of being those parents who make frantic phone calls every time our kid stubs his toe or gets a sniffle. But we don’t have a normal baby. It’s okay for us to be overly worried. We should be. And if anyone we’re making frantic phone calls to thinks we’re annoying, that’s their problem.

So Mrs. J went to the hospital, while I held down the fort with Charlie. And by “held down the fort”, I mean I dozed off with the phone next to my head. Did I mention this was all in the wee hours of the morning?

We managed to get at least three conflicting reports of what was going wrong. First I heard they thought Gus had the croup. Whatever that is. Isn’t that what you whip horses with?

But they decided to take an x-ray to make sure it wasn’t aspiration. The x-ray determined that it actually wasn’t croup. But that it was aspiration. Possibly.

Which is to say, there’s fluid in Gus’s lungs. This is bad for a number of reasons. The obvious one about Gus not being able to breathe as well, but this increases the risk of Gus getting pneumonia. Which is probably the last thing we want right now.

We’re not 100% sure what caused the fluid to get into his lungs. It could be he’s got wicked bad reflux, which is causing what he’s eating to snake back up his narrow esphagus and end up in his lungs. Or it could be he doesn’t know how to drink out of a bottle after all and it ends up going down the wrong pipe.

They were sure Gus has a cold, so they can’t tell anything definitive. But if Gus can’t drink out of a bottle, this would be a catastrophe. Becuase Gus hates, hates, hates his feeding tube. He’s just miserable the whole time, crying, and screaming and clearly in pain. We don’t know why that is either.

What’s more, we’ve noticed he’s a lot more pukey and runny out the back when he’s fed through the tube. We want all that food down and digested, so he can put on weight.

In any case, the people who can figure that out won’t be in the office until tomorrow. So they said to start feeding through the tube until then. Which has meant lots of screaming, crying baby, who hasn’t been happy all day.

And if he can’t drink out of the bottle, I don’t know what we’re going to do. Because I don’t want to go on with a baby who spends all his feeding time crying and miserable. He’s not the only one miserable when he cries.

I suppose the only bright spot is that we didn’t get admitted. Thank goodness for small mercies.

Anyway, that’s my story for today. Hope everybody else had a happy Easter.

* Aspirating in this case means “going down the wrong pipe”. So formula ends up in his lungs. Again, with most babies, they’d just cough it up, but Gus doesn’t quite have that reflex yet.

Update: reading over that, it makes it sound like today was a total downer. And sure, the Gus thing cast a bit of a pall. But despite that, the weather was unbelievably nice. We met my parents for brunch after mass and Charlie had the worlds tastiest french toast. Everyone took a long nap. We had a picnic dinner in the park, and Charlie attacked the playground like they were banning fun in the next few days. It was a really good day.