Choking Scare and our First trip to the ER

James has definitely been keeping us on our toes! Last Saturday night he had a really scary episode where I went to go pick him up to feed him and I found him choking on really thick, cheese like spit-up! It was so scary!!! He had some of it running out of his nose, his eyes were really wide open and his face was a purpley red. I scooped him up right away, turned him on his stomach and started pounding his back. I could hear him take a tiny raspy breath every few seconds, but his breathing still definitely wasn't back to normal. My heart was pounding out of my chest!! I kept pounding his back and I tried to put my finger in his mouth to see if I could clear anything, but his jaw was clamped shut. Slowly he started to get his color back and more milk drained from his nose and he coughed more of it up. Once he started crying loudly, I felt much better. It was so scary!! What made it worse was Anthony wasn't even there, he was driving home from Port St. Lucie. I called him once he was breathing better and Anthony said that I did all of the right things. I really need to take a baby CPR class so that I can know what to do if heaven forbid anything worse happened.

So that was Saturday night. Last night, monday night, I was nursing him around 11pm and when I went to burp him, his spit up was a reddish/brown. It looked like blood! He has been fussy the last few days but we just assumed that he was going through a growth spurt. He didn't seem any more bothered or fussy than he had been for the past few days, but we wondered if maybe the fussyness was from something else that needed to be looked at. He kept spitting up every few minutes or so and it all was full of brown specks. We don't have a pediatrican yet in our new town, so we didn't have an after hours to call. It was off to the ER for us! After what happened Saturday there is no way that I was going to relax until we got him checked out. He was a perfect angel all the way to the hospital and the entire time we were there! He wasn't too fussy and he mostly slept, which is a good thing since we were there for 5 hours. We waited in the waiting room for 2 1/2 hours and I ended up nursing him again there. He spit up more brown stuff, but it seemed to have more white in it this time. Once we got to a room, we waited almost an hour to see the doctor. There was only one doctor on duty and he seemed very frazzled (but very nice!). He checked him over and said that he looked very healthy, which was good, but didn't give him very many clues as to what was going on. So he decided to have me nurse him again and see if he vomited or spit up as a test for something called pyloric stenosis (it  means that a valve in his stomach is not letting his food pass into his intestines). This still didn't really explain the brown in his spit up, but we went ahead and did. Wouldn't you know that kid didn't spit up one bit after I nursed him this time! The doc said that it pretty much ruled out pyloric stenosis and he really didn't have an explanation for the brown spit up.

Since he is so healthy looking and doesn't seem in pain or bothered by it, they sent us home. My only guess is that he had some random bleeding because of reflux that stopped or perhaps I was bleeding while nursing him and didn't realize it? Either way, I was glad to get some piece of mind that we weren't ignoring something serious by not taking him to the ER. And even though it stunk to wait 5 hours before we could go home, it only cost us a $25 copay and our time to get some peace of mind so it was totally worth it.

Here he is, sleeping in the room they put us in. Do you see that little smile? That stinker never looked healthier once we brought him to the ER :)