Will has had a little bit of a cough lately so I took him to the pediatrician yesterday to have him looked at. After struggling to listen to his lungs (Will kept jumping on my knee and while he was standing up) she said that he had bronchiolitis. This isn’t to be confused with bronchitis; it’s definitely not as severe. If we were to get bronchiolitis as adults we would brush it off as a cold. What it does is inflame the tiny airways (bronchioles) that lead into your lungs. As they become inflamed, they fill with mucus, and make breathing slightly more difficult. Because it is a viral infection, antibiotics are useless. Since his cough has already lasted for over a week, she had us try a breathing treatment with albuterol in the office. What this will do is relax the muscles in the airway and increase air flow to the lungs. She said that if the breathing treatment worked she would set us up with a nebulizer to take home with us. He sat there like such a big boy for the full five minutes and let me hold the mask to his mouth and nose (his head is too little for the pediatric mask. It covered his entire face). When he finished she came back in and listened to his lungs again and said she noticed a slight improvement. We now have a nebulizer and a cute little fish mask for Will to take his breathing treatments with. When this was all done, she looked in his ears and noted that his right ear looked a little cloudy. This was quite a surprise because he hasn’t been showing any signs of an ear infection. She prescribed us albuterol for the nebulizer and amoxicillin for his ear. Hopefully within two weeks he’ll be good as new.
They weighed him with his clothes on, he was 17 lb. 2 oz. but because his clothes were pretty thick yesterday, I’m going to guess that he’s in the low to mid 16 lb. range.
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