RSV? She hadn’t heard of it, then her child was hospitalized
It started out as a runny nose and a cough — typical cold symptoms.
Then things took a turn for the worse.
Courtney S. Martin noticed that her 19-month-old son, Calvin, was having coughing fits. He started breathing rapidly, his nostrils flaring. He refused to eat or drink.
“Every time he took a breath you could see he was working hard — you could see his rib cage sucking in,” said Martin, a mother of two in Rutledge, Pa.
Calvin’s pediatrician advised Martin to head to the emergency room, where she learned that her son had respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.
By the age of 2, nearly every child has contracted RSV. In most children, it presents as a bad cold. But for others, it can cause breathing problems and dangerous lung infections — and many parents have never heard of it until their child becomes ill.
What is RSV?
Every winter, RSV becomes a common and potentially serious illness, said Dr. Ethan S. Wiener, associate chief of pediatric emergency medicine at NYU Langone Health.
While it affects both children and adults, it is most dangerous — and can even be fatal — in babies who are born prematurely and people with weak immune systems, heart disease or lung disease. But even babies who were born full-term and healthy can develop severe symptoms, like Calvin or like Andre, a toddler from Mission Viejo, Calif., who contracted the virus in 2016 when he was 3 weeks old.
“It was really scary seeing your son hooked up to so many monitors and not knowing what’s going on,” said Andre’s mother, Alexandria Salahshour, who wrote about the illness to raise awareness.
They spent Christmas that year at the hospital, where Andre was admitted with a blood oxygen level of 70 percent. It should be close to 100 percent.
Like many parents, Salahshour was unfamiliar with RSV. “I remember just being in the corner, kind of hyperventilating a little bit,” she said.
In otherwise healthy patients, RSV can usually be treated at home. Children who have been