Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Wonder Baba podcast. My name is Sheena Mitchell.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: I'm a pharmacist and mum of three.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: I combine healthcare and practical advice to help you on your parenting journey.
[00:00:15] Speaker C: If you enjoy listening to a Wonder.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Baba podcast, I'd be really grateful if.
[00:00:19] Speaker C: You could follow or subscribe and leave a review.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: It really helps to support the show.
[00:00:24] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: I am delighted to partner with one of my all time favorite products, Salon plus, this is the world's 1st 100% natural dry salt therapy device. It's clinically proven to relieve a wide variety of allergens and respiratory conditions. This salt therapy method has been trusted for generations and has become hugely popular worldwide. As more and more people recognize the superb results achieved from a natural and noninvasive method, this device will help you breathe easier and sleep better.
[00:00:56] Speaker C: The intention of this week's episode was to share a mother's experience of RSB. Actually, what happened was so much more. Today I chat with Sinead Hingston Green and we chat about her little boy Albie's experience of RSP. But as with every one of my real life's episodes, there's so much more to real life than just the presentation of an illness. We chat about how hard it is for Sinead to see a child sick now after the loss of Jeff, her husband, in tragic circumstances about eleven years ago. At the time of Jeff's death, Sinead was 19 weeks pregnant with her beautiful daughter. Since then, Sinead has met Michael and they have two more beautiful children. But before the birth of Albie, Sinead tragically suffered from four miscarriages. Obviously, all of life's experiences and life's losses shape who we are today, and it was incredible to hear about the emotional impact that has when Sinead is dealing with a child with illness. Sinead is a wonderfully practical mom and throughout this episode, we talk so much about the issues surrounding RSV and how long it normally takes to present itself and its relationship with bronchiolitis and what happens to your baby's airways. We also chat about how to help spot RSV and bronchiolitis through breathing patterns and other warning symptoms. Sinead shares her whole story and I'm very glad to say that little Albie pops on to help present his side of things. So at point to this, obviously, baby Albie is chatting in the background, but I think if you're listening to my podcast, you're probably a parent and you probably feel Morty's with two adults chatting.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Over a giggly baby.
[00:02:50] Speaker C: I wish I had video because Albie is so adorable. He spent his time smiling and waving at me and yeah, us mummies did what we do best and multitask. I really hope you enjoy getting to know Sinead and that you learn a lot as we discuss all relevant medical information about RSV and bronchiolitis.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Thanks so much for joining me today, Sinead.
[00:03:14] Speaker D: Thank you for having me, it's great.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: I am delighted because I think we were speaking there just before we started recording about how important it is to talk about bronchiolitis because it's one of those conditions that no one seems to have real awareness about. And I think it's a bit confusing because it's referenced to as RSBE and bronchiolitis. So you have had a recent experience of bronchiolitis. Can you tell me a bit about it?
[00:03:39] Speaker D: Yes, my husband is south african, and just to give you a little bit of a backstory about me, so my first husband passed away eleven years ago now when I was pregnant with my first little girl. So Lily is eleven in December. So he died very suddenly. We were just on holidays in Portugal. We'd only just got married seven months before and we had gone to Portugal the following July. We got married in December and we were a week into the holiday and he died very, very suddenly the day my parents and his dad were with us. And they were due to go home that day and he died at 12:00 in the afternoon. We were out on a boat trip. So I won't get into it too much because obviously that's not what this podcast is about, but just to give you an idea of my background, it was a huge shock, obviously.
And then a couple of years later, I met Michael. So we obviously got together and we went on to have Dylan, who is now four and a half. And then we decided we would go for number three. And, yeah, just kind of assumed that we know, do the deed, get pregnant and have a baby. But unfortunately, we actually had four back to back miscarriages when we were trying to have our third little guy. But very luckily and blessed to have an Albie in our lives now. So he was born December last year, so the 13 December 2021, and he is just, yeah, he's divine. Anyway, he's a total dream boat, but Michael is south african, so he turned 40 this year and he decided, well, I decided that we booked flights to head over to his mates for his 40th. So we went over in April for Easter and I got on the plane, we all got on the plane, everything was fine. You wore your masks as much as you possibly could on the flight landed in South Africa, and we were staying with friends of his. And their little son wasn't overly sick, but he wasn't overly well either. He had a bit of a cold. I didn't think anything of it. Like, genuinely just didn't think anything of it. Know, Albie's around Dillon and Lily all the time, so they all come home with colds all the time. So we went away for Michael's birthday weekend. So we landed on the Wednesday and we went away that Friday, then for the long weekend, and we were away Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. And by the Sunday, Albie was starting to get a little tiny bit of a. A bit of a runny nose. Nothing too worrying. Just a normal cold. And the place that we stayed, it was beautifully sunny on the Friday, but on the Saturday, we woke up to torrential downpours and we were in kind of like.
Almost like a cement kind of glamping place. Like it was a camping style place. So it was very damp and very wet for the whole entire weekend. It just didn't let up.
So then the Tuesday, we were due to go to a private game reserve and we kind of waited then until the Wednesday to go and we left very late. It was dark when we were leaving and Albie had gotten worse over a couple of days before that. But again, a couple of his friends are doctors and they said, look, just keep an eye on him. They had actually given him stuff to give him in an. Now they're pediatric doctors. So they knew what they were doing and knew what they were prescribing to him. And I was happy enough to trust them to do that. So I'd given them the nebs to kind of, I suppose, ease it a little bit for him because his cough was getting a bit worse. Anyway, we went to go to this private game reserve and we ended up hitting a pothole on the way and getting a double blowout in the car. We were driving. Stop. Oh, God. It was horrific. Absolutely horrific. Pitch dark South Africa. Like a really dark side road off the motorway. Like, I was petrified.
Albie's screaming his head off. Dylan's screaming his head off. We're on the side of the road. So, long story short, his friend that we had been staying with ended up having to come and get us and bring us back to his house in Pretoria.
So we're back in the house and got Albie to sleep, but he had gotten to the stage that he was really. And so every time I fed him. I was still breastfeeding at the time. Every time I fed him, he'd feed fine, but then he'd cough and he'd literally just gag it all up and, like, projectile gagging this feed back up again. So it was like it was going down, but it wasn't able to stay down because it was too much phlegm. So I was getting a bit more worried about him. His temperature wasn't overly high at all. Like, it was 38.1, maybe.
There was no alarm there for me either.
And then a couple, like his friends were saying, look, it could be RSV. And I was like, it could be what? I have never heard of this thing before in my life. And I was worried it was Covid. So we'd done a Covid swab and that was negative. So I was like, it's really strange. That's the first thing that jumped into your head and they start coughing and nose going.
So we had actually seen just before. I forgot this bit. Just before we left to go to the game reserve, we had seen one of Michael's friends, colleagues in the pediatric hospital in Pretoria. So I brought Albie into her. She had said, look. And she had given me a whole load of prescriptions and said, look, I don't know if I'm happy with you going. And then she rang Paul, his friend, and Paul was like, they're only an hour away. And she said, ok, fine, go. But if he gets any worse, you'd come straight back. So this was. Sorry. Just before we had left to go to this place anyway, ended up coming back into her then on the Thursday and said, look, I'm going to send you to a physio and hopefully it'll clear the phlegm. So I said, perfect. So I went to the physio appointment and I was dead late. We went to the wrong place first, because obviously we're in South Africa and I'm literally all over the shop. And when I got there, I was in just this bag of sweat, I think 10 minutes late for the appointment. The physio was not impressed with me at all because obviously it was late in the afternoon and I literally just stood there and went, if you can't take them, that's fine, but please don't stand there and judge me for being late. And I just burst out crying. I was like, I had this sick baby. I'm doing my best. I was just going, please don't judge me for being late. I'm trying. The stress that we had. Oh, my God. Total stress. I'm not knowing at this point what was going on with them, really. Like, he had had the nebulizers. They didn't seem to be helping, so she did her physio on him. He was hysterical for most of it, until the end, when he finally coughed up, obviously, what was bothering him and what was making him cough.
And I found the physio fascinating, the way they did it on the babies, like the way they patted them and all the rest. I know they don't do that here.
I need to say. We were in South Africa, and they do things very differently over there.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: And do you know what's interesting about that? Because they use that type of physio really frequently on cystic fibrosis patients here.
And it does, because cystic fibrosis, they get an awful lot of excess mucus and thick mucus down in the lungs. And physio can be the only thing to help loosen that, and it becomes part of the baby's cares day. First thing in the morning, try and lift that mucus. Bronchiolitis is really tricky because often it's a dry cough, so no mucus on the chest, but as you said there, because it's associated with a runny nose, all of a sudden you have this nasal drip.
[00:11:11] Speaker D: But he was just full of phlegm.
Nothing was staying down because he was so full of phlegm.
So she did the physio, and he, again, at the very end, just vomited everything, and he just stopped crying. And it was, like, smiling again, and it was like whatever was blocking had relieved, and he was just happy again.
So before we left, she said, look, I'm really just not happy with him. Like, he was only four months old.
And she said, I would like you to go over to a e over in the main hospital again and just get them to give him a once over.
I'm just not happy with him. I'm not happy with his breathing. I'm not happy with how upset he was when you got here. Like, it's great now that he's happier.
But she. I just. I would rather you went back over and just have him checked out. And I was like, absolutely no problem. So we walked outside and he literally got sick everywhere. Started coughing, but to the point that he couldn't actually catch his breath because he was coughing so much. And it just gave me an awful fright. So we went over, back over to the hospital again. Michael had the other two, and I'm on my own here, know, sitting in the hospital. It just kind of brought back all the trauma from the miscarriages and being on my own in hospital, it was really hard.
So we went into a e and thankfully, the doctor, the consultant that had seen us the couple of days before, had come down absolute earth angel. She checked main, she said, no, like, you can't go, sorry. Like, his breathing is really distressed. And she said, see the way he's pulling in underneath his ribcage? Like, he's not breathing normally, he's actually pulling in the waist. And he was doing it really rapidly at that state because he had had such a coughing fit. He was just not in a great way, but, yeah. So they kept us in and they had him on oxygen very quickly after checking him out. They did swabs and they did chest x ray. And to be fair, they were so thorough with all of the things that they did for him. And it came back that he didn't have Covid, he had rsv and bronchiolitis.
And I am going to have to just run up and grab him, if that's okay. Absolutely.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: He's going to join us. Hello.
He is just gorgeous.
[00:13:30] Speaker D: He's not ready to wake up. He won't stand up. You always know when he's still tired.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: He's like, cuddle me, entertain me.
[00:13:37] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:13:38] Speaker B: I was bored up there.
[00:13:40] Speaker D: Literally half an hour. God, I know those days. I beg your pardon?
Yeah. So she told us that we'd have to stay the night anyway, but I knew by her that we would be staying a lot longer than one night.
So we were checked in, thankfully extremely busy. The hospital was absolutely full of tiny little kids with ORSV and thankfully, again, got a private room, which was amazing because we ended up being in there for six nights. Wow.
So the day after we got there, I think we probably hit the peak. The kind of morning after was absolutely horrific.
He just kept coughing and at that stage, it was almost like dry wretching because he was struggling to keep anything down. I was exclusively breastfeeding, so I just offered him feeds as much as possible in the hope that he'd keep some of it down.
And to be fair, he did well with the feeding. His appetite never really went away, but it was just trying to get him to keep it down.
[00:14:45] Speaker B: That can be an easier thing when you're breastfeeding, because you can do little enough rather than.
[00:14:51] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[00:14:52] Speaker B: Yeah, sometimes.
[00:14:53] Speaker D: Well, I brought in a cot and I just said, look, there's no point in you bringing that into the room. He's not going to stay in it. So I kind of made like a cot bed, I suppose, the two of us. And then they actually brought in an adult bed with the side, the big sides on it. And the tube was just basically camped out there for the week. And there was a lot of skin to skin, and he had oxygen on, so it was really hard. He had to maneuver that all the time, or the tubes for it. And he had physio twice a day, which it was a godsend if he didn't have that. He'd spend a whole night kind of gagging and retching, and he'd have his physio in the morning, and he'd be like a new baby for a few hours until it built back up again, and then he'd have more physio in the afternoon and again like a new baby.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: And how many days in was that? Thursday? Was that five days in? Maybe to the start of kind of symptoms.
[00:15:44] Speaker D: So he started. He was symptomatic on the Sunday?
[00:15:47] Speaker B: Yeah, four days in. And that's really typical. And that's where it's tricky, because you're at home dealing with what you think is a cold or whatever, just a normal little kind of bug.
But bronchiolitis peaks at three to five days.
[00:16:05] Speaker D: And it was like clockwork.
[00:16:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And I know because this is one situation that you kind of say to parents, actually set your alarm and go in and check on your baby during the night, whereas normally you kind of wake when they wake, and you don't really want to be losing any sleep because babies are awake often enough anyway. But it's no harm, because, like you said there. There's a lot you can do. You can visually see the breathing deteriorate.
Yes, Albie, that's right.
You can see the breathing go in. You can see their chest rays, and they're really. I suppose part and parcel is the risk of dehydration. So you can have a little feel of their head to make sure that the soft spot isn't sunken. And it's hard because you're trying to assess so many things. I can't imagine the fright you had as you kind of started to realize things were deteriorating at that three to five days.
[00:17:02] Speaker D: Yeah. I think when we hit the worst day, I don't know. I think the average person is just like, oh, it's fine. It'll start getting better from here on in. But I tend to go to dark places. That's unfortunate. I suppose the reality for me is that, God, he could die. And I'm away again. I'm in a foreign country, and I'm back in the hospital, and I'm like, oh, my gosh, I can't do this again.
This real fear of, like, sorry, can babies die from this thing that I've never heard of before? The reality is, you have no idea. One baby could actually be okay with it, but the next baby might be very ill and end up in ICU with it.
It's just one of those things that you just don't know how bad it's going to get before it starts to get better.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: And especially if people have babies that are kind of premature or have any other underlying respiratory conditions or any weak immune system. But you know something? This is kind of strange, but something that really struck me there when you were describing the story. I've heard you speak about Jeff, who passed away in Portugal before. I've heard you talk about that story. And you described the change in weather, and all of a sudden it was cold.
[00:18:18] Speaker D: Yeah. Oh, my God.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: And it's just weird there that you say everything was lovely, and then the weather changed.
[00:18:26] Speaker D: The weather.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: I'm like, I'm a real. It's very, like. It's just weird. It's one of those things you're connecting. Not that, obviously, you know, something bad isn't going to happen every time the weather changes, because realistically, we live in Ireland. That would be every day. But I can imagine for you, you're going, oh, the last.
So negative.
Look, first time mammys especially, but actually, even me now on my third child, if any of them are sick, you just get super frightened, regardless of your kind of grief history or your experience of loss before. But in that scenario, and know, after suffering the.
[00:19:16] Speaker D: Imagine, and we had just had Covid in the February, so we'd actually been in Tala for the seven days isolation period, really, in the February, and that was only a couple of months before that. And both of us, I got Covid first, and then I obviously gave it to him. Just makes you feel really wonderful about your stuff.
So he was only eight weeks when he had Covid, so that's why they kept him in Tala for the week, because they just said he was under the ten weeks, and it was more precautionary than anything else. He was actually totally fine. Again, very low grade temperature. But that was it. Nothing else happened to him.
But I suppose I was worried that because he had just had Covid in February, that he wasn't going to be able to fight this because it was so soon after in my head, but I can't even describe.
I know they say that babies bounce back. Like, after he reached the peak on that awful day that we had of him really just coughing and just being so full of mucus constantly. They had to do the saline wash, I think, twice that day because he just couldn't shift himself.
And literally, the day after, he just started to come back again. And I was like, oh, my God, this is, like, insane. Just like that.
It's like they go to the worst place and then all of a sudden the bounce back is just incredible.
[00:20:45] Speaker B: If only we bounce back as.
[00:20:50] Speaker D: Just remember. I remember crying. I cried for the whole night. I just remember thinking, like, I thought I was going home. They were all in the kingdom, like, Michael and Lily and Dylan, with Michael's parents waving away.
They were all in the kingdom like a resort, and they were ages away from me. So Michael wasn't coming in to visit at that stage. They were gone too far away to be able come back and visit. So all of Michael's friends, to be fair, spoiled us rotten and they sent stuff into us. But you couldn't have anybody else in the ward because the ward was absolutely riddled with the. So I just. I just sat and cried when they said, look, we're going to have to put him back on the auction. And I was, okay. Like, part of you is like, oh, my God, that's fine, because obviously he needs it. But the other part of me was just absolutely devastated. And I just remember the loneliness being in there. You got this worry about your baby, but at the same time, you're there by yourself. It's a really lonely time for parents. A lot of the time, parents have other children at home, so their husbands or their wives, whoever's in there, is at home with the other kids. And you're taking on the load of the worry almost, because the other parent is kind of living life with the other kids.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: Sometimes you feel sorry for the person at home because they feel so out of control.
[00:22:07] Speaker D: There's the other side of it. You've got all of this to think about and worry about on top of a sick baby. But, yeah, I found I take great comfort in Instagram. In times like that, people with similar experiences that kind of say to you, look, you're going to be fine. He's going to reach a really bad peak and it's going to be a horrible day. But after that, he's going to start getting better and just listening to people who actually have been there and all that through kind of, I suppose, sharing your experiences on Instagram which I have always taken great comfort in. But, yeah, it was just really scary because I had never heard of RSV before. I'd never been told about it. I don't ever remember getting a leaflet or anything about it at any checkup, even with Lily and Dylan. This is my third baby. I don't ever remember hearing those three letters to do with any of my kids before. And now. It's funny that this year we had it in April and really bad, and now there's loads of awareness being raised about it now, which is amazing because so many people have messaged and said, I've never heard of this. What is this thing?
[00:23:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:13] Speaker D: So actually, it's probably worthwhile. You've done a lot of information, things on it, but what is so this.
[00:23:21] Speaker B: For people listening to this, who didn't catch the last episode, just have a little flick back, because I go into it in a lot of detail there. But basically, RSV is respiratory synctitial virus, and it causes inflammation and irritation in the bronchi, basically in your baby's lungs. And because that inflammation, they can really struggle to breathe. But it also comes with symptoms like blocked nosed, a bit of a low grade fever, dipped appetite, that kind of thing. So dehydration can be an issue with it. The fever is never usually too bad, too extreme, like other conditions. But bronchiolitis is, I suppose, the presentation of RSV in the lungs. So you have the virus RSV, and what it does to the lungs is called bronchiolitis.
[00:24:11] Speaker D: They both come together.
[00:24:12] Speaker B: So RSV is the leading cause of bronchiolitis. It's not the only cause. So the symptoms in the lungs are bronchiolitis and that inflammation and that difficulty to be able to get the right levels of oxygen into your baby's bloodstream, basically. So I suppose the performance of the lungs are impaired, and a lot of children will have RSV by the time they are two. That's the normal kind of age group that they would have had it and had immunity. Some children, it'll just look like a normal cold, and you won't even know they had it, and yet they'll have developed immunity. But now what I'm finding. So, say if we take the last three weeks as an example, and even last year, last year, the rates for SV were something like three to four times higher than pre Covid times. This year, the first two weeks. So week 39 and 40, they were like 15% up on last year, which was already really high. And it's predominantly affecting the zero to four age group and causing difficulty in that age group. And you do have to wonder, did lockdown maybe prevent children coming across?
So they didn't have it before? So now we're having maybe double the amount of sick babies that we normally would. Of that, there's going to be some who need hospital attention. So on top of COVID on top of flu, which is also kind of rumbling away gently in the background, it's not too bad now. The levels are still low, but it did start to circulate earlier this year than other years. So with all of that combined, you've got a lot of increase in hospitalizations and pressure on the children's hospitals. And it's just a delicate winter. I think this year, the only thing I'd say that gave me a bit of hope about the rsv was the two previous weeks were up significantly for rsv, but this week just gone. So kind of the middle of October week wasn't as high. So it was high, but it wasn't as high. So I wonder, did it just arrive earlier, do you think?
[00:26:17] Speaker D: It's because it's so mild still?
[00:26:20] Speaker B: It's a very seasonal virus, this one. It's like flu. It comes at this time of year and even there are loads of other viruses, like when your child has cold, it's likely they have rhinovirus or an entrovirus. These are viruses that are normal. Absolutely. Okay. That they're circulating this time of year. Normally, children can cope with them well, you might just think they have a cold. The reason, obviously, things get a lot worse during the winter. Generally, this virus just starts circulating. People are indoors. A lot more children are, I suppose, get the windows open, interacting. But then at the same time, if you have the windows open, you could be worsening conditions like asthma, if your child has asthma. So you can't win.
[00:27:03] Speaker D: You can't win.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: This is the thing. Even there, you said, I gave him Covid. You're like, no, you didn't give hope. You did give.
You didn't wrap it up in a bow and go, I know, here you go. This is a gift from me to you. It happens, and that's normal. And that's not anybody's fault. I can tell you now, he is going to give you a lot more than you.
And that's just the nature of these bugs. They circulate around houses. My own child had a horrendous vomiting bug last weekend. I never really had had such a kind of horrible experience of it before. And she was just 12 hours and it just did not stop. And God bless her, she was crying, she wanted to go to sleep and she couldn't because she was just constantly vomiting.
You can't do anything about that. And when you're a mother, you're going to jump in bed with your child. No matter what's coming out of them, you're just going to cuddle them literally and love them. And sometimes it'll spread all around the house and sometimes we were very lucky. I still don't know how I didn't catch.
[00:28:10] Speaker D: Yeah, Dylan's the only one in this house that hasn't had Covid. We all got it. I think it's the ginger hair. I think he's just invincible.
[00:28:18] Speaker B: There might be something to that because my childhood Covid, I slept in the bed, didn't get her. I'm immunocompromised. I'm one of the people at risk of COVID and I'm like how? I've worked obviously in the pharmacy the whole way through the pandemic. No days out. I still haven't caught it. I think they need to do research in.
No.
[00:28:37] Speaker D: Maybe you're asymptomatic. Maybe you're one of them.
Maybe you had it and you just had no symptoms.
[00:28:42] Speaker B: I'm a testing lunatic if anyone in the house has it, okay. Because I'm so conscious, I'm going into work, say at the moment. Yeah, we're vaccinating the over risk group. So I'm like, I would never not test if there was a hint of it in the house. But yeah, we're few and far between at this stage.
[00:28:59] Speaker D: Yeah, it's so hard because we're at the stage that we're like, is he sick enough for me to go to the doctor?
I feel like with the RSV I probably was two days past when I should have actually brought him to the hospital, if you get me. And I wonder would he have gotten as bad as he did had we not gone to the private game reserve and had we gone to the hospital that day?
And I know shoulda, woulda, coulda. I do know that. And there's always going to be the parental guilt that comes with it all. But what would you say so in normal circumstances of a baby, like he was what, four months old? So he was 1617 weeks old.
Do you go, when does a parent need to go to a doctor?
[00:29:43] Speaker B: And that's really important because first of all, even if you had brought him earlier, all they would have done and been able to do and all they can do for bronchiolitis is symptom relief. Okay, so they would have had him on those nebules that help relieve breathing. They would have ensured he had fluids to make sure he didn't get dehydration and a bit of energy if he wasn't feeding. But it is a virus. They can't give magic antibiotics because antibiotics will not work for the virus. So what's really important here is that your child may well just be able to manage it at home. And ultimately it's that fine line. You obviously don't want to clog up the hospital system unnecessarily at a time of.
But at the same time, and more importantly, is that no one will ever, ever give out to you for going into an e because you're worried about your sick baby. And gut instinct is the leading, I think a leading thing. Gut instinct comes from, I suppose, being aware and considering all of the information as well. So any difficulty breathing, that's a key reason to go into hospital. Also, if they're taking less than 50% of their normal feeds over the last kind of two to 3 hours for a very young baby, that'd be the guidance that there's a risk of dehydration. And dehydration can actually be serious in very young babies.
[00:30:59] Speaker D: When they're working harder to breathe, they're more tired, so they don't want to feed as much because they're tired because they're working so hard to try and breathe.
[00:31:06] Speaker B: And that blocked nose that comes with bronchiolis, the runny nose babies when they're feeding, are feeding obviously with their mouth, so they have to breathe through their nose. So definitely using something like a saline nasal spray before feed can actually help clear the nasal passageway. So at least just for temporarily so that they can breathe through their nose to have their feed.
[00:31:25] Speaker D: To have their feed, yeah.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: And that can just help keep them on top if they're very tired and irritable, that's another thing. Like if they're falling asleep when they wouldn't normally, or like there a few minutes ago, you know, Abby was waving away at know, responding to normal interaction. That's good. If they stop being capable of doing that, or they're just falling back asleep when they wouldn't normally. That's important. You need to kind of react to that. And then, as I said, there temperature obviously normally isn't a huge issue with bronchiolitis, but in rare cases it can be, or it can be a sign of other conditions and even, look, there's viral meningitis and everything going around at the moment now, viral meningitis is very different, and I would implore people to listen to. I have an episode. If you just look through the episodes, there's one called please listen and act for meningitis. I go through it a lot there because they're very different symptoms, and it has a very quick onset. So you're talking kind of a few hours of rapid deterioration before, whereas with bronchiolitis, it's three to five days before.
[00:32:25] Speaker D: Three to five days, yeah.
[00:32:26] Speaker B: The worst happens, and because of that, three to five days, you're kind of. They're going, oh, look, this is fine. They must be nearly at the tail end of it. And then you go, well, this is it.
[00:32:34] Speaker D: And we'll ride the wave. And he must be nearly over now. We've had it for a few days, or you might have one morning.
The morning we left to go away for the couple of days, he seemed much better. Like, much better. But by the evening, then, it's like he had nosedived. Now, I don't know whether it was the events of the day or what, but just that evening, he got so much worse. And then the following day, then we went back to the consultant, then to the physio, and then landed ourselves in Amy. This kind of false sense of security of like, oh, no, we're good. We've ridden it now, and it seems to be getting better. And then all of a sudden, bang, he just hit a wall and really struggled then for two days of treatment and oxygen to give his lungs a break. He was like a new baby. Again with the physio. Now, I know the physio obviously isn't done here, so I don't want to dwell too much on that. Be a big part of Alvi's treatment.
[00:33:26] Speaker B: And there is a lot you can do to clear that mucus in other ways. So even on really young babies, you can use saline nasal sprays kind of regularly, like, before every feed and before bedtime. Sometimes people will use kind of a humidifier in the room, which helps to keep that mucus running and prevent it thickening out. So we have one online, the Medisana one, and I like that one. It has a little disc in the side that you can add, like, do you know the snuffle babe oil? All of that.
[00:33:56] Speaker D: Very good.
[00:33:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Helps to kind of keep mucus running and stop it getting clogged, which can help with the breathing. But even things, like, a lot of people are like, okay, I don't have humidifier and it's living cost of living crisis. I don't want to be forking out anything additional.
[00:34:09] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:34:10] Speaker B: And until you are in the situation, you don't know you need it. So even putting a damp towel on a radiator if your heat is on, or warm bowl of water, like under the radiator with a few drops of the snuffle bay boil, anything like this can really help to add a bit of humidity to dry, cold winter air.
[00:34:29] Speaker D: What about bringing them into the bathroom and just fucking on the hot water and letting the room fill the steam?
[00:34:34] Speaker B: That is where you should be reading your last bedtime story or doing your last feed for younger babies. Absolutely.
I always laugh because if one child is sick, I'm like to. The other one's going there now and have bath for a while.
Multitask. Let's make use of this.
[00:34:49] Speaker D: Close the door. Let's get you all better.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: Get it all steamy.
[00:34:52] Speaker D: And how long should they be in the steam for? That's what I've always, I did it to get them recently, and I was like, I actually have no idea how long twist to sit in here.
[00:34:59] Speaker B: You're only going to get your bathroom so steamy. It's not easy to create a full on spa hotel steam environment. So I would say a good, like 20 minutes. It depends. Now, obviously, it's going to come down to practicalities. So however much your bedtime routine that you can do, but definitely bring a cushion for the floor, because I've been there before.
[00:35:22] Speaker D: I've been there.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: Not comfortable.
And that's where those plug in humidifiers are. Good, because they'll just run all night. Because steaming.
[00:35:29] Speaker D: And what about the clever mama one?
We have that one upstairs.
[00:35:34] Speaker B: It's a humidifier. I haven't seen that one.
[00:35:35] Speaker D: Now, salt lamp, I think.
[00:35:37] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:35:38] Speaker D: But it shoots out steam.
[00:35:40] Speaker B: Okay. So basically, I normally recommend if you're using salt therapy, to use the salon. Plus, because salt and humidity, if you can imagine, they don't actually work well together. It's one or the other, really, because salt attracts water. Okay. And salt is heavier when it attracts water. So if you have salt that you're trying to release into the room, it won't get into the bronchial airways unless it is tiny microcrystalline salt particles. They have to be able to float in the air. Okay. And if they're in a room that has high humidity, they're not small enough. They clump together, they're not able to free float enough into the respiratory airways. So there's two different products that I always talk about. One of them is the salon plus. And that's something that I use every night as a preventative thing because it's great at preventing congestion and inflammation in the airways in children who kind of are suffering from recurrent coughs and colds. But once you have a lot of nasal congestion, so some virus has hit and you're just full of snots in the house. Basically, that is when I would plug out my salon plus and literally go hide it in the hot press or something away from the humidity. And plug in the medisanic humidifier. Let the steam build up overnight, because the steam is better at getting rid of blocked, blocked noses because the particles.
[00:37:09] Speaker D: Are so tiny, so it gets right in there.
[00:37:11] Speaker B: The steam is basically moisturizing the airways. So what happens at night is the cold air and breathing through their nose, all of the mucus that's in their nasal passageways and then dripping down into their lungs becomes thicker and thicker. So by adding the steam, you're diluting it, keeping it thinner and thinner, and it can just run like it normally would down the back throat. Yeah, it is interesting. And people get very confused about the difference between those two products. And they're really not two that, like salt and water shouldn't be together. They're not going to do anything if they're not apart, if you know what I mean. So I always describe it that salt. So, like, the salon plus is preventative, so it helps to keep all the airways in really good condition. And for children with asthma, they have actually a natural, regular problem with thickening mucus. So they would use that all the time. Whereas with other kids, it might be things like hay fever or whatever that triggers. So that is good for that. But when it's a very thick, mucusy kind of problem, and that only usually lasts for a week or so, you'd be kind of putting the salon plus away and digging out a humidifier. But equally the same with humidifier. If you don't have access to a humidifier, that's okay. There's enough other things to be getting. And if it's few and far between that you have respiratory problems in the house, then literally damp towel on the radiator. And like you said, steam up the bathroom. All of those kind of natural tips are really useful. And hydration is key as well, because keeping hydrated helps to keep mucus from thickening out as well.
[00:38:45] Speaker D: So just trying to, with a baby, it's so hard.
They just literally lock that jaw and they're like, not drinking.
[00:38:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And to be fair, you know, when you're sick yourself, you have no appetite, you've got mucus. And especially for babies, they're so reliant. Like, we can sip on water and take a breath. Sip on water and take a breath. Much harder for babies latching on. Latching off. They get confused. It's not their normal way of feeding, and it just adds stress. And then you don't know if they have a little sore throat or sore ears that are hurting when they're feeding. So it can be a bit of detective work.
[00:39:19] Speaker D: His ears were really bad as well. Actually, you mentioned ears.
What I found fascinating with it was the cough. For the amount of mucus and phlegm that he seemed to have, the cough, to me, should have been chestier, as in, like, the wet cough, the proper chest cough, but it was like a little dry cough to begin with. Like a little kind of the amount of mucus that came with it. I was like, how is this cough so not normal? But you know what I mean? It wasn't a proper. Because the chesty Fleming cough all kind.
[00:39:53] Speaker B: Of comes from the nose and post nasal drip. So often the mucus isn't even getting into the chest. Okay. So it's going into their tummy and making them puke, or it's going down and they're coughing that up as it comes along. But the dry cough, like that irritated, kind of wheezy sound, is coming from inflammation. So, like in, say, a regular bacterial chest infection, it would be the mucus stuck in the lungs that's causing that. Whereas with this, you can feel the crackle and you can feel the inflammation or the struggle of their breath because of the inflammation in the airways. It's different. I have a little sound bite of bronchiolitis cough in the last episode, so people can listen to that. Yeah, it's horrible, but helpful. Just because there's so many different kinds of coughs.
[00:40:43] Speaker D: Yeah, well, that's it. And the breathing thing, again, I would never have known. Babies obviously go through all these different breathing patterns. And I remember when he was a newborn, I used to stare at him because obviously, having four miscarriages in a row, it took me, and still does take me a long time to actually accept that he is okay and that there's nothing wrong with him and that he is just perfect.
It's like a psychological thing. Like, there has to be something wrong with him. Like, I had four miscarriages before him, so he can't be okay. There has to be something. And I remember just staring at him, watching them breathe. And I was so fascinated by all of their different breathing patterns. Like, they can breathe normally, they can breathe really fast. If they're having a nice dream, it can be different again. I remember in Tala, it was only because I stared at him so much when he had Covid. And I remember saying to the doctor, he stopped breathing for a few seconds, and then he took this one big breath and he was like, you know, that's perfectly normal for a baby of eight weeks to do that. And I was like, what? And he was like, babies can stop breathing for 20 seconds and then they can start breathing again. And it's a perfectly normal breathing rhythm for them to. And I was like, what? But I had never sat watching and watched him breathing for any prolonged. But there was only the two of us sitting in the hospital. So I used to just sit there, just stare at him, and he was like, it's normal for him to not breathe for a few seconds and then take breath. That's what babies do. And only for the friend, like Michael's friend, who told us to keep an eye on his breathing and how he's breathing again. It's something I would never have known to look out for because I just assumed that, because he wasn't feeling know that he was breathing a bit heavier than normal, but he wasn't. He was pulling in, his lungs weren't filling at all with air.
[00:42:27] Speaker B: And you have.
[00:42:28] Speaker D: And he was really struggling.
[00:42:29] Speaker B: Video of that on your Instagram under Auris Aldi to look at that, because it does show it really clearly. It's really good.
[00:42:40] Speaker D: Yeah, it's in a highlight now. Somebody asked me to save it, so I saved.
Just popped it in a highlight. But it's just interesting to see where they're breathing from. So a normal baby's breath, am I right? Saying their tummies should be going up and down?
[00:42:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And they shouldn't be pulling in that much. It should be easy. There shouldn't be so much effort. And then the speed starts to come with it. And while, like I said, their pauses in breath are kind of okay, but if there's regular struggle and they're not keeping a normal. Oh, yeah, that is another hospital scenario. But look, it's a minefield. And you have to remember that. It's not like you need to identify things straight away. Like, look, with RSV, you're going to be judging it day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. You're going to be in that situation and you're only going to be able to do what your gut is telling you to do at that moment and that'll change 1 second to the next. I think being aware helps you to make better decisions so I'm really grateful for you sharing your experience today because it's just so important. I suppose parents know what to look for and to hear. I'll be chatting in the background there.
[00:43:53] Speaker D: Sorry. I did think he would sleep for the hour of no such luck.
[00:43:57] Speaker B: I would just like to say I think he contributed a lot and look what happens when you come out the other side of bronchiolitis.
[00:44:03] Speaker D: Well this is it. This is it.
[00:44:05] Speaker B: Thank you so much Sinead for joining me today to help increase no problem.
[00:44:10] Speaker D: Thank you for having me.
[00:44:11] Speaker C: If you enjoy listening to a wonderbabber.
[00:44:13] Speaker B: Podcast I'd be really grateful if you.
[00:44:16] Speaker C: Could follow or subscribe and leave a review.
[00:44:19] Speaker B: It really helps to support the show. Thank you.
