The Annual RSV Season Celebration, 3rd edition*

What is RSV, you ask? Why, let me educate you! RSV is Respiratory Syncytial Virus, a cold-like bug which would give you or me a cough and sore throat for a few days. When it invades a tiny person, however, especially a tiny person with asthma, RSV latches on and digs in its whiskery heels, invading the lungs and causing wheezing, severe coughing and, my personal favorite, belly breathing (that makes it sound like we're doing yoga here at 3 am). The last three times Wee has had it, she's been hospitalized and done time in the oxygen tent. It's a party, let me tell you. Sitting there in the middle of the night, watching her blood oxygen level dip below 90% while she hacks away--good times!

I knew it was coming. First, the Husband got it. Then the Biggie. I held it off valiantly, washing my hands and the Wee's so much that our skin cracked, instructing coughers to cover their mouths and sneezers to wipe their noses. I tried, I tell you! But she went down on Tuesday night. For the first few days I thought she might shake it off. We humidified her; we pounded phlegm from her lungs. She sniffled, she coughed, but she did not WHEEZE.

Until Friday night. The coughing began in earnest at 10:30. If you've never heard an asthmatic cough, it sounds like a barking seal; it's a honking rasp with water around the edges. In between coughs, on a really bad day, their shallow breathing sounds like whistling, and if you shove your ear right up against the back, the lungs make a sound just like milk being poured over a bowl of Rice Krispies. It's utterly terrifying. Of all the difficulties I've encountered as a parent, compromised breathing cuts closest to the bone. I've dealt with 106-degree fevers, repeated failed blood draws, full-leg casts, stitches, skin grafts, the Inquisition-style strappy lung x-ray and the plexiglass tube squished-baby lung x-ray. I've watched one baby's burnt skin slough off in sheets and nursed the other one to sleep while the doctor sewed her toenail back on. But nothing, I repeat, NOTHING, comes close to that pattern of shallow inhalation caught by a full-body wracking cough, followed by…silence, as your child stops breathing. In the middle of a winter night. When you're thirteen miles of icy roads from the hospital.

But we're experienced by now, we're good at it, we are SKILLED--so we didn't panic and got through the night. The Wee woke up Saturday morning, clam-happy and ready to play. I brought her to the doctor, who confirmed the Rice Krispy crackling, we got some prednisone to complement her array of asthma drugs, and went home.

Five minutes after she fell asleep that night, she coughed so hard she threw up. Every time I lay her back down, she would stop breathing and cough, over and over again. She couldn't take a full breath, so in between coughs she took tiny, shallow baby breaths, forty or more a minute. Panicked, I called the doctor, who had previously said that given Wee's respiratory history, she would admit us if there was any problem that night. My bags were packed, I was ready to go. But then there was the issue that Wee, once she woke up, was perfectly fine. Totally, absolutely a-ok. She laughed when I sat her down in the steamy bathroom and chortled when the Husband turned her upside-down and pounded her back to dislodge mucus from her lungs. She obediently put her face in the humidifier's spray and said, "I like hanging out with you guys, doin' all this stuff!" Yeah, kid, it's a blast.

Last night was a repeat act of the previous night, and this morning here we are, she happily watching a movie and running circles around my limp form as I suck down a fourth cup of coffee. So happy RSV season, everyone! I wish you clear lungs, bountiful steroids, and a humidifier in every room.

*Though this is the Wee One's fourth winter, we were somehow able to skip this party the year she was one. That was the year we went to the emergency room three times in as many months for (1) facial dog bite requiring two stitches (2) a mysterious elbow dislocation and (3) second-and third-degree burns which required plastic surgery.