Smoke Breaks

Around Christmas I was thinking rather smugly to myself how lucky we were not to have gotten sick this year.  Fate came back to bite me in a big way.  We have been hit by croup and brochiolitis.  According to WebMD, croup is a harsh, barking cough and bronchiolitis is an infection of the bronchiols, the small air passages in the lungs. Basically a fancy way of saying that my two children were kidnapped in the night and replaced with grumpy versions of Wheezy from Toy Story. 



We have been in quarantine for roughly 10 days now and the isolation is beginning to get to me.  Because my happy, smiling husband doesn't come home from work every night to break up the monotony, I start going crazy if I don't get out of the house pretty much every day.  With the exception of trips to the doctors office and the occassional errand run, we have been hermits. I have seen "Sesame Street: Learning About Letters" ballpark, 30 times, and the other day I caught myself looking up characters on Sesame Street on Wikipedia.  No joke, the voice behind Elmo is actually a big black guy (not that there's anything wrong with that--just surprising.) The scariest part is that I'm beginning to actually enjoy not leaving the house for days on end.  The next thing you know I'll be the focus of a 20/20 special about the lady who hadn't left her house in 20 years and was found six months after her death surrounded by hundreds of cats.

Luckily, we don't have any pets and I get to spend my days hanging out with two of the cutest wheezers I know.  They've been really great sports about the whole thing, but I now know what it's like to have newborn twins.  Exhausting. I spend most of my days rocking or holding one of both of them (they've been really miserable) and most nights trying to get them to sleep--I'm up about every 2-3 hours. 

Every four hours we have to take a "smoke break" AKA nebulizer breathing treatment.  It's a fancy machine that produces a mist that the girls breathe in to coat their lungs and help them heal.  Roughly 40 minutes total to get both girls done (and trust me, it's not easy keeping them still that long).  There's also getting the yucky prescriptions down, changing bedding and pajamas when they throw up, and extra baths to help them sleep better.  Thankfully our hard work is beginning to pay off; we have our fourth and (hopefully) final doctor appointment tomorrow and with any luck he'll give them a clean bill of health so we no longer have to take smoke breaks and can join regular society again.  And that would be swell.  In fact, I might even break out into song...