Croupy Ethan

We met with an ENT in June because Ethan has had croup about every six weeks since December. He suggested that Ethan have a bronchoscopy so he could look down his throat and see if there was anything abnormal. Chad and I himed and hawed about the procedure because Ethan would need to be put under anesthetic to have it preformed.
We finally decided to go ahead with it so we would know what was going on. He had the procedure at Children's Hospital on Thur day August 21. Ethan did great! The procedure took about 20 minutes and then he had a few hours of recovery. He did not like waking up from the anesthetic and was fussy for about and hour but did wonderfully aside from that. The staff at Children's were top notch and made us very comfortable and less nervous about the procedure.
The doctor explained to us that Ethan has an artery laying on his trachea. This causes his throat to be a bit more narrow then normal and when he gets a cold if his throat swells at it causes him to have a croupy cough and noisy breathing or stridor. The doctor is confident that he will outgrow this and we shouldn't need to do anything further unless the croup gets worse or more frequent, then we would need to do a CT Scan and an Angiogram and possibly have surgery to move the artery. The technical term for this is called innominate artery compression of the Trachea. There is a great article about it on Medscape but it won't let me post it here. If you are intrested in reading about it just google it. We are praying that he just outgrows it!