Tips for RSV

Unfortunately we had to deal with RSV last week. My friend Sandy was kind enough to share some tips from her experience. I thought I'd pass along the wisdom:

My biggest tip - get one of these - nosefrida.com It is quite possibly the nastiest thing you will ever buy as a parent, but the key to clearing out RSV is clearing out all that Elmer's Glue snot and this thing works WAY better than any bulb syringe ever could. I had to order mine, but I believe they sell them at Target and Babies R' Us, so you might have better luck locally if you wanted to get one (saline is helpful in loosening stuff, too). I didn't have one with the first baby and her nose was in pretty bad shape after constant bulb syringing for weeks - and even though I rock with a bulb syringe, wasn't doing the job very well. Got the nosefrida right after the second one got out of the hospital and couldn't believe the difference - its way less traumatic on their nose, works twice as well - and gives you a lot more control once you get used to it - and you can actually clean it out, which is very helpful :) Whatever you use, though, suction like a mad person - the more of that glue you get out, the easier it'll be for him to breathe and the less coughing he'll do.

For the cough, a cold mist humidifier (especially in a tent of some kind) is awesome. I can't remember how old your son is...probably pretty mobile...so sticking him a carseat with a sheet tent over him probably isn't an option :) He might like a chair/blanket tent, though! You want the mist pretty concentrated - not just like the humidifier blowing next to him - so whatever you can do to contain it around him will help.

You want him sleeping at some sort of angle, too - not flat so all the glue-snot doesn't drain down and get stuck.

I know you're already doing the neb treatments - if they gave you a mask to use (hopefully) instead of something to stick in his mouth, you can also put a little saline in there in between treatments and use that to make mist to breathe in and help loosen up the junk. Toddlers and neb treatments usually don't mix very well...good luck with that...hopefully he's taking to it better than my kids did! We had to do a lot of restraint and distraction to get the whole treatment done!

One last little thing -- we found that like 75% of the nurses and respitory therapists we encountered didn't have very accurate info on RSV (stuff like claiming that adults can't get RSV - which isn't true - and therefore can't transmit it to children - um...hello - Germs 101! A toilet can't get sick, but you can get germs from touching it!) and would not all agree on what constituted "breathing problems", etc. Many would just say if their skin was sucking in between their ribs or they were wheezing - like an asthma attack - that was a problem, nothing else indicated breathing issues. Neither of my RSV kids had that happen - even when one had like 70% oxygen saturation, her ribs didn't suck in and she didn't wheeze. For my kids, it was the skin around their collarbones (like at the dent at the bottom of their neck) would suck in or they'd breathe very quickly and shallow (like 80 breathes a minute) - I had to MAKE nurses check oxygen stats to prove I was right since they didn't view those things as normal breathing problem signs. My doc said that babies and small kids will often breathe shallowly to combat not being able to breathe well (thus the collarbone sucking in and the hyperventilating) rather than trying to breathe deeply, but not being able to. So, anyway - I know your husband is a doctor, so he probably knows all this already, but thought I'd throw that out there in case you had come across one of the "adults can't pass germs to kids" people, haha!

I think that's all I've got...I'll let you know if I think of anything else - hopefully there was something new to tweak or try in there, otherwise, I guess you're already doing anything I could recommend :)
Be prepared to keep an eye on him for a while after he's "better" - most kids with RSV have asthma-like problems for a while afterwards, so you might want to keep the nebulizer around just in case.