Where in the world is Thomas

I will give you one hint...you don't need a hint. We are back in the hospital. His stridor had increased in both frequency and volume and he had a fever and was very listless (I was told to be very picky when using the word lethargic). So we drove to the ER in Cincy early this morning. His oxygen level was pretty low, 80's, so they put him on oxygen right away and eventually moved us up to the PICU where he is on heliox. It is a futuristic looking machine. 

But it does wonderful things for Thomas's breathing. He is silently sitting here awake and happy, which is rare, if not unheard of. 

He also loves Super Tom on his head like that, so really it is a bad experiment. Is it the heliox or is it Super Tom (THANKS RATHJENS!). Doctors may never know...

They aren't sure what is wrong with him, so we are going through a process of elimination trying to figure it out. Chest x-rays, airway x-rays - on a separate note I am excited to see what super power he will end up with from all this radiation - ENT scope, steroids, etc. In the process of writing this, they have decided it is a bad case of croup. So we just have to support him through it with help breathing on the future machine and possible breathing treatments. Not awful news. Unfortunately though, when they were telling me about what they saw on the scope, they mentioned that he still has vocal cord paresis. We were hoping that he would regain use of those vocal cords after the decompression surgery. Which is disappointing, but not a complete surprise. It just means that later down the road we will have to a procedure of some sort to help him open his vocal cords all the way. For now we wait and hang out in the hospital and let the croup run it's course...with our music on!