Hospital Adventures (the long version!)

The kids have had a cold. It all started with Caleb, who gave it to Natalie, who gave it to Amelia. That's how it goes with more than one kid, sickness just keeps getting passed along down the line. But for two-month old Amelia, sickness is not as easy to handle. I was keeping a really close eye on her and doing a lot of research on when to worry about a cold in kids. Usually, it is not too concerning if there is no fever (or even a fever for just a couple of days) and the kids are able to breath ok. Well, all was going ok other than a pretty stuffy nose, when on Wednesday night Amelia started to seem as if she was really struggling to breathe. I heard a slight wheeze for the first time from her, and she was panting. I kept counting her breaths per minute and it was 15 breaths higher than what Dr. Sears says warrants an immediate trip to the ER. So I called our family doctor and he echoed the advice, so off to the ER we went.
Apparently, babies who are struggling to breathe take priority in the ER because we got into the back with almost no wait time despite a very busy ER. The doctor listened to her and agreed she was not able to breath well. He ordered a chest x-ray and a breathing treatment that included a steroid to help ease her rapid, drawn breaths. He then ordered a blood sugar test, which came back really high. His diagnosis based on this was possible diabetes and he immediately called OHSU to see if we could get a bed there and started an IV. Upon a second blood sugar test (and another prick in the heel, poor girl) the blood sugar had lowered significantly and he called the on-call pediatrician. She said that the steroid treatment had probably caused her blood sugar to spike. They did yet another test and found she is positive for RSV ( a respiratory virus). The decision was made to admit her since she is so young and could have oxygen problems really easily with RSV. In the morning, the on-call pediatrician came by and let us know she would be keeping us one more night for observation, since most RSV babies tend to get worse before getting better and they weren't sure where on the curve she was. Sure enough that second night at about 1am she was not able to hold her oxygen levels high enough while sleeping and they started her on oxygen. Throughout today they tried a couple of times to take her off the oxygen, but had to put her back on as soon as she fell asleep. We have been told she will need to stay in the hospital until she is able to hold her oxygen levels up without assistance for an entire night. As for right now, she is still on the oxygen, so we may be looking at another night if things don't rapidly improve overnight.
Here are some pictures from our adventure so far.

The oxygen tubes she now sports on her nose.

Sleeping peacefully now that she can breath.
Her arm is all wrapped up to keep her from pulling out the IV.
The albuterol breathing treatments she gets every 3 hours around the clock.
This is the torture device used to give her a chest x-ray.