Poor Little Guy Can't Catch a Break

     Lincoln had been having a cough for a while and I finally decided to take him in to see the doctor. I expected the usual "oh it's just going around... it'll pass." Good thing I took him in... His oxygen level was really low and right when the doctor came in the room he had him use a nebulizer in hopes of opening him airway. Turns out he had bronchitis. They gave me a nebulizer to take home and use on him about every 4 hours. When he would play and crawl around I could hear how hard he was wheezing. It was pretty scary. On top of that, he had an ear infection and had to take an antibiotic twice a day. If that wasn't enough, the very next day he fell off our bed, almost 4 feet high! Fortunately all he had was a scratch on the side of his face. (You can see the little red mark in the next picture, it's by his eye and eyebrow.)

     Saturday night around 11 o'clock I noticed his breathing was very shallow. He was coughing, wheezing, and heaving and not inhaling very much so Chris and I decided to take him to the doctors. Since it was a week end night, the only thing open was the ER. Luckily they saw us right away.  

     Here we are in the ER using his nebulizer which is just a machine that vaporizes medicine in order to open up his airway. He did pretty well with the nebulizer as long as he got to play with it. It soon turned into Sunday morning. My mom knew he wasn't doing well the night before, and so she met us there at 1 in the morning with food for us. She's the greatest support!

     The doctors wanted to take chest x-rays of him to make sure everything was okay. We sang to him the 'Itsy Bitsy Spider' while he was getting his x-rays and he did a great job of staying still. We waited another hour or so for the results and they told us that there is an abnormality in his x-rays! Of course that worried us right away, but we were not expecting the dreadful news we were about to get.

      They showed us his x-rays and told us that it looks like he has an enlarged heart.

     That was the last thing on our mind, that something could be wrong with his heart! So many things were going through my mind and I was just trying to hold back tears. They did some other tests on him for his heart but everything else came back perfectly fine. 

     They made an appointment for us to go in the following day (Monday) and from there we would see a specialist. It felt like the longest wait of our lives.

The doctor was explaining things to Chris and I and he said that he and the radiologist looked over his x-rays and everything seems to be fine. Apparently it was just his "thymus shadow" that was making it appear like his heart was bigger than it actually was. He said that in babies the thymus is pretty big but when they're sick it swells and gets bigger. As you get older the thymus shrinks down and becomes an organ that hides behind your heart. Phew! So it was just a BIG scare! We're going to take x-rays again at his 9 month visit when his cough is completely gone just to make sure everything really is okay. 

      The VERY next week Lincoln broke out in hives. It looked like a bunch of bug bites all over his body, but it progressively got worse. Turns out it was an allergic reaction to some food he had the day before. I took a picture to keep an eye on it and to compare whether it was getting better or worse. That night it got worse and spread even more.

     You can see the rash was really bad on his under arms and later it almost covered his whole stomach then sped to his neck and eyelids. It cleared up the next day so I was glad about that!

     Not to mention he is constantly falling and hitting his head on the tile floor. He just doesn't give up, no matter how many times he hurts himself he still insists on pulling him self up to stand and climbing up what ever he can find! Is this just the the beginning to our trips to the ER?? Maybe these are just the "perks" of having a BOY! One things for sure, he's definitely a tough little guy...