After being awoken by his gnarly barking as he tried to suck in air in his sleep at about midnight, I thought I would try the cold air trick. Luckily, we had plenty of that around. I threw on a coat and stood with him outside in the eerily calm night. He stayed asleep for a few minutes but when he sprung awake, he sort of, well, he freaked out and began hyperventilating. This mixed with his barking seal routine had both Audrey and I worried, and so, without hesitation or discussion, we agreed to take him to the ER.By the time we got there, his breathing had calmed, he was fast asleep on Audrey's chest (we broke the law for his comfort, sue us), and we thought the worst of it past. Regardless, we decided to finally page Dr. Bernstein, our pediatrician. The young man who answered for the paging service was rather polite and sociable, which at 12:30 AM is rather a nice treat. When he asked me about who we were and why we were calling, he asked, "Is that him in the background?" His breathing was worse than we thought if a paging service employee could help to diagnose his condition from the back seat.
After a few minutes, Dr. Bernstein called, and within a few minutes, paused and asked, "Is that him in the background?" We decided to take him in to the ER at the behest of Dr. Bernstein. And so, like my mother and father did with me numerous times in my infancy, I sat in the ER with my son, his breathing sounding like that of some creature out of the Jabberwocky.
We spent the better part of the evening in Room 33, in the back far corner of the ER, listening to the rattle of my sons croup as he (and mom) slept on the gurney beside me. I played on my phone as they rested in between visits from the not-quite-up-to-snuff intern whose bed-side manner was akin to Dr. Kevorkian. In between jamming a syringe full of steroids and apple juice a fair distance down his throat and jabbing needles in to him, after which he didn't offer to put a band aid on the bleeding wound, we were able to catch some rest. I read the free first chapter of the Audacity of Hope. He is a much better orator than writer (if, at all, he wrote it himself).
By 4 AM, he had all of his steroids and inhaled medications. Some of them twice. He had slept through the worst of it, nestled in between mom's legs on the gurney. For him, this won't even be a memory. For us, it will be one more rung on the ladder of parenthood.
He is resting calmly, and peacefully, this afternoon, sleeping through car rides as Audrey and I try to catch up on our missed morning of work. In a way, it seems a little like a surreal dream that isn't really too bad or really disturbing, just one of those dreams that isn't great, but it is so surreal and matter of fact that you can't get it out of your head for the next day.
