Sick. . .

Last Sunday afternoon Colten played a wonderful soccer game. We got home and a little while later he started coughing. We sit there thinking no big deal, he's getting a cold. As I put him to bed he feels slightly warm and I take his temperature which is at 100.1 degrees. Ok, so I'll keep him home tomorrow from school, no big deal. Well he wakes us up at 1:00am coughing still, but goes back to sleep. At 4:15am he starts crying and I go in to check on him, and he reports that he feels like he can't breathe. Ok, panic starts to set in. But hey, we have a nebulizer at home and albuterol in stock so we give him 1 breathing treatment, he doesn't sound or feel much better so we give him a second one. He reports that he's feeling some better after that one and promptly falls asleep. He's still having rapid short breaths though and a fast heart beat. We let him sleep and I get a doctor's appointment as soon as they have one available. We get to the drs office and they check his vitals and when they hook up the blood oxygen monitor to him they keep rechecking it thinking that he must have it on wrong. But no, his blood oxygen level is down at 90-91%. They looks Colten over, take the history, make a consult call, then direct us to take Colten to the ER and that they'll call ahead and let the hospital know that he's on his way over. So we head to the ER where they give Colten 3 breathing treatments of various sorts, draw blood (I think the trauma of that one will stick with him awhile!), do flu tests, etc. They eventually decide that he's not responding like they would hope and decide to admit him into the hospital for the night. After they finally get us upstairs they start breathing treatments again every hour, and early in the night as his blood oxygen level still wasn't raising put him on oxygen as well (now that was quite interesting trying to get a sleeping child to let them stick the oxygen tubes up his nostrils and not rip them off. I ended up having to crawl into the bed with him and hold his arms down the rest of the night so that he wouldn't rip it off). Tuesday they spent trying to wean him off of the oxygen and space out the breathing treatments. By Tuesday evening we were down to breathing treatments every 3 hours and they took the oxygen off right before bedtime. He managed to do well with that overnight, and Wed. mid day we finally got to come home.
It felt so good to finally be home. I was a walking zombie by that point for lack of sleep, but I knew I could at least sleep in my own bed that night. Colten's first comment on coming into the house was "Why is it so dirty?" How to explain that when Mommy is gone for 3 days and everyone else is just trying to survive that the house gets kind of messy?
I must say a HUGE thank you to all of our friends and neighbors that jumped in to help take care of Jaden and Ashtyn from getting Jaden to and from the bus stop, entertaining him after school, etc., Ashtyn actually got to go to the zoo, etc. with friends. Everyone was such a big help, and we couldn't have done it without you!
So what was it that caused Colten to get sick. Their best guess is a virus that caused an inflammatory response in his airways. I guess that they have had quite a few cases that are similar in the past month in kids with no history of asthma, etc. He was tested for H1N1 and many other things that came back negative so it wasn't anything like that. They did say to watch him closely now as the second option was that it could be the beginning of asthma, but they really seemed inclined to the first option. This picture is when he was in isolation before the H1N1 tests and other tests came back negative. Felt like we were in an E.T. movie as the nurses and doctors came in all suited up and with their own air supply, etc.