Boston's First Trip to the Emergency Room

Many of you have been wondering what is going on so instead of retelling my story numerous times, I just decided to post about it. Sorry about the length of the post ... A couple of months ago, Nick and I were going to sleep aroudn midnight. Boston had been sick so he was sleeping in our bedroom near the humidifier so we could monitor him. We went to sleep and were listening to him as his breathing was very erratic. This breathing continued for about 15 minutes before we turned the light on to watch his chest rise and fall sporadically. All the sudden his chest dropped and no breaths were coming in or out. He had stopped breathing. We picked his limp body up and his face was white as a ghost. We called 911. They responded quickly but Boston was breathing by the time they got there. They monitored him and checked his vitals and said they could escort us to the hospital but he seemed to be doing fine. We decided to stay. We went to our pediatrician the next morning. They were all puzzled at what was going on. They sent us to a pulmonary specialist at Primary Childrens where we had a chest x-ray and at an home oximeter test which monitored him for 2 nights. Those results all came back fine. They wanted us to do an overnight sleep study at Primarys to see if he had sleep apnea. Things had been going okay and we never thought it would happen again. On Sunday this week, Boston started choking (on nothing) but seemed fine after his arm was held up. On Monday after coming back from seeing my family, my sister and her new baby in Vernal, I met up with Nick at IKEA. We had walked upstairs onto the 2nd floor. Nick was holding Boston and all the sudden he started choking / gagging and couldn't catch his breath. We thought we were going to have to call 911 again. He finally got the choking over but then he went limp again and white as a ghost. His eyes looked like they were looking right through us like we weren't there. I felt like I was in a maze at IKEA and we were screaming for an exit. We finally got into the parking lot and into the cold weather. He seemed to come about himself a little bit but was still pale. We called the on-call pediatrician and they suggested we go to Primary Children's ER. We took him up there at 10 pm (what a joke). We didn't get into a room until 2:30 a.m. and didn't see a doctor until around 4:30 a.m. They did numerous tests on him including an EKG (as you can see from the picture above), another chest x-ray, kept him on the monitor and also did a suction test where they shoved a tube down his nose into his throat. So far they have ruled out apnea, asthma, allergies, blockage or mass of any kind in his body, seizures, etc. We didn't leave there until around 8 a.m. that morning and none of us had any sleep. We saw the pediatrician on Tuesday and were at Primary's on Wednesday and Thursday for more tests. Yesterday we went up to Primarys for a swallow study where they made him fast for 3 hours and as soon as we got there they taped his legs together, laid him on a hard surface, held his hands above his head and made him drink Barium (chalky substance w/ grape flavoring in it). I bawled watching him scream, gag and choke down 1 oz. out of 8 oz. while his calm father tried talking him through this nasty procedure. They THINK that it may be a bad case of acid reflux where the acid is coming up and burning his throat. It comes up and he chokes on it and eventually passes out. We are going to treat him with medicine for the reflux and hope that this stops his 'not-breathing episodes.' It has been a long and exhausting week but hopefully we've found a solution. I have hated having him there watching him have to go through all these tests. This past week has made me extremely grateful for the good health that my family has and how I take it for granted.