Our 1st ER Visit

As we drove home from our exciting Friday night adventure Scott said, "Now I feel like we're officially parents." That's right.  We spent our first night in the emergency room.  Thankfully we got to come home and sleep in our own beds!  Warning, this is long!

It started on Friday evening when Scott was setting the table and I was getting dinner out of the oven.  Addie was just playing in the living room and all of a sudden we both looked at her and she was hunched over, choking and trying to pull something out of her mouth.  She was completely panicked.

Scott got to her first and threw her over his leg and started pounding her back while I tried to coax her into coughing it out.  There was about 15 seconds where she stopped breathing completely and her lips started turning blue.  TERRIFYING!

The scene of her trying to get her breath and cough the object out and us trying to coax into coughing it out and breathing continued for about 10 minutes.  When she wasn't gagging and throwing/coughing up muccus she was screaming bloody murder.  After that we were able to kind of calm her down and she was starting to be able to get some decent air.  You could hear that her breathing had a rattle to it.  We knew something was lodged in her throat.

We called the pediatricians office to confirm that we needed to go to the ER and the nurse said that we absolutely needed to, so we made a mad dash out the door.  Thankfully, dinner was ready, so Scott wrapped it up in foil, threw it in the bag.  And the biggest lifesaver of all, he remembered to grab blankie!

The rest of the story is a little fuzzy to me because we were moved from room to room and there was a whole lot of screaming and chaos.  We rushed to the hospital and were seen immediately because they extremely concerned.  What a blessing.

I was so grateful that Scott was there too!  Being 9 months pregnant, I really can't carry Addie and there was a whole lot of carrying and cuddling that needed to be done.  He also knew exactly what to tell the nurses and doctors so that we didn't waste any time. They found out he was a med student and were really excited that he was almost one of them.  I think this helped us get a little special treatment.  They took such good care of us.  We were never ignored or left waiting for hours like you always hear about in the ER.  I guess there are perks to being a doctors wife!  I was also grateful to have him around because during the X-ray, I couldn't be in the room because of the risk to the baby in my belly, so I had to leave my baby (yes, I call Addie my baby) screaming bloody on the table while they tried to hold her down.  Luckily Scott was able to stay by her side.

After the x-ray we could clearly tell that she'd swallowed a coin.  The little stinker.  They placed an IV in her, not fun.  We were then taken to a different room to prep her for the operating room.  Then they took us into another room and talked to us about putting her under.  Again, thankfully Scott was there so I didn't freak out.  I'm grateful he's so comfortable in the world of hospitals.  They gave her a little bit of anesthesia in our arms, to subdue her, then they took our baby away.

I have never handed my child over to a complete stranger and let them walk away with her before.  At this point I was about in tears.  I mean, don't they have a window that I can watch the procedure from?!  After they went and retrieved the "government property," as quoted by the ENT we were taken to the PACU to wait for her to wake up.

Her tokens from the hospital

When they brought us back, we didn't even recognize her.  She looked so helpless!

Waiting for her to wake up

She was pretty excited about the popsicles!

We were so grateful that everything ended up so well.  The doctors and nurses were amazing and took such good care of our little girl.  We're also grateful for amazing friends who helped us out very last minute.  In the end, it wasn't a huge deal, but it was still a pretty scary ordeal.  She's doing fine now, but is still struggling coming off the anesthesia.  The doctors told us that she'd feel like we feel when we have a hangover... haha, little did they know we have no idea what that's like:)