F is for Fansler: Hello hospital!

Poor Jackson had a bad bout with a virus :( Basically, Monday after I picked him up from daycare, they said he was wheezing, so I took him to the pediatrician. They did a breathing treatment there, and his wheezing stopped. We were sent home with a nebulizer and were told to do it every couple of hours. He had a rough night Monday night and hardly slept. We returned to the doctor on Tuesday morning where they once again did a breathing treatment and the doctor said for us to keep on doing that. I pushed for some explanation on his fever, rash, cough, runny nose, etc.. and he basically said it was probably just a cold and the wheezing could be the beginning of having asthma since it runs in my family. Tuesday he progressively got worse -- no energy, fever of 100+, no appetite, and still having labored breathing. When he took a nap, it looked like he was hyperventilating while he was sleeping. When he was awake, he was just poopy and didn't want to play or even make eye contact. He just wanted to snuggle and whine. Michael wanted to be proactive so he went and bought a pulse ox meter for his finger, and when we did that at 6pm, it was only at 84% saturated. They will not let you leave the hospital usually if your pulse ox is below 94.. sooooo... at this point, I took him to Rex Express Care.. within 2 minutes, the doctor said "oooh, I don't like what I see.." His heart was racing (upwards of 180 bpm), he was breathing at 60+ breaths per minute, and his oxygen was barely at 90%. He told me that he was going to try and get him stable enough to let me drive him to the hospital and avoid an ambulance ride. The treatment didn't help him that much and they called for EMS. He was admitted and was poked and prodded all night. He was dehydrated so it made it extra difficult to find his veins to do an IV.. that was probably the hardest part. :( When he was on oxygen, his levels were good. When he was off oxygen, he could not maintain the levels. They did several breathing treatments and we saw relief for short bouts of time. If the treatments did not help, they told us that as hard as his little body was working, it was eventually going to exhaust him and we would have to put him on a ventilator. Good thing I listened to that mommy voice and took him in because it could have happened at our house Tuesday night. We had to stay over night in the triage part of the Children's ED because they didn't have any beds for us on the main floor. Early Wednesday morning, we were transferred to the PICU because he was on fast flowing oxygen (6L/min) to help get as much oxygen into him as possible. He finally rested and woke up feeling much better. He was tachycardic because of the albuterol and fever so that alarm kept going off, but the doctors assured us that he was ok. Wednesday night they came in every 2 hours to check him and to put albuterol in his oxygen line. Slowly they decreased the % oxygen from around 40% until it was down to 21% which is what we breathe in normally. Then, they slowly decreased the speed until they turned off the oxygen completely early Thursday morning. They said he had done so well overnight and that we would be able to go home. They did, however, set us up with an asthma specialist to talk about the rescue inhaler that we would need to keep at home in case he started wheezing again. He still has signs of a virus of some sort (it was negative for Flu and RSV) and coughs occasionally, but he isn't having any troubles breathing like he was before.