911 redux

My very first ambulance ride was just as strange as I expected it to be. It was the most surreal morning of my life. We rode out the whole day and night Saturday with Jack getting more and more wheezy, and finally broke down around 5 am on Sunday morning. We couldn't bear the 9 hour emergency room visit that we'd experienced on Friday, so we called our Pediatrician's office in the hopes that he could get us past some of that crap. No such luck, in fact his after hours service went directly to the Emanuel pediatric on call nurse. She could hear Jack through the phone and insisted that we call 911. I have never called 911 in my life. I felt very strange about it. But it ended up saving us a great deal of time. The EMTs have their own special entrance and because we came by ambulance, our wait in the ER before being admitted was a mere two hours. But wait, I failed to mention the fact that they strapped me to a gurney in the ambulance with Jack on my lap for the trip to the hospital. Then, when we got there, the EMTs actually took me out of the ambulance on the gurney. May I just say that it looks like a really long way from the back of an ambulance to the ground. I freaked out just a little until I felt those wheels drop out of the stretcher thingy. On the way in they gave Jack two breathing treatments - essentially asthma medicine in a little fog they pass by his face - and they seemed to help. He was in great spirits the whole way and actually flirted with the EMT and all of the nurses in the hospital. He may not be able to breathe, but he still has a way with the ladies. He got a few more treatments while we were there and slept and ate like a champ all day. Finally I think the nurses just felt a little weird about having a baby napping in their hospital while his mom watched the Oscars and drank coffee. They cut us loose at about 6 PM. I was nervous - could we really go from needing an ambulance to discharge in just 12 hours? But, babies do that. They go downhill very quickly (just ask anyone whose ever had an infant get dehydrated) and can recover just as fast. Right now Jack is sleeping like...well like a baby actually. I'll add a few more pictures of both Jack and Audrey in the next blog. For now we're just happy to be home and hope to see no more of the inside of a hospital for a good long while.