Hi everyone, I am back ( and slightly at the length of this thread, plus emails and phone messages, I appreciate it very very much.
DS1 is OK now although he is pale and still has a hacking cough, he is on a salbutamol inhalor and steroids. His chest X-ray was OK so the diagnosis is viral chest infection - although they all seemed to assume he was asthmatic, which as far as we knew he isn't which was a bit strange. They said either he will have more attacks or he won't, there's no way of knowing, but we need an inhalor at home for him from now on.
DS2 is also home now, his cough is marginally worse and he is a bit pale and miserable. When I took him to A&E they seemed to think he was worse than ds1, he was really battling to breathe with a temp of nearly 39; he had to have oxygen for about 3 hours (which he fought and struggled and I was on my own having to force it on him) and then a nebuliser/steroids/paracetamol/brufen in the resusc. area before they admitted him to the ward. His chest X-ray showed a "shadow" on his right lung and there were deep crackles in his chest, so the diagnosis there is the same viral infection as ds1 but with a secondary bacterial infection. He is on antibiotics, steroids for longer than ds1 and inhalor every 4 hours day and night for 5 days, which will mean lots of fun and games because he hates it. Again, they were surprised to hear that we didn't know he was asthmatic, they just assumed he was. How can two fit healthy children suddenly just "become" asthmatic over one weekend, fgs? Apparently there are three stages of respiratory "recession", intercostal/sub-costal/tracheal tug, and both our boys had all three, so it was quite a serious attack of whatever it was I think the worst thing was that they just seemed to assume that the boys were regularly treated as "asthmatic children", they thought we would know how to use the inhalors etc, whereas we have never had anything like this before, as far as we knew until Saturday neither of them had any breathing issues at all!
I spent the first night in hospital trying to coax ds1 to take oxygen through a mask because his SAT kept dropping to the low 80's (it recovered dramatically quickly the next day, luckily), and last night ds2 had to be held down and forced to take his inhalor every hour all night, and he spent most of the time in between crying, shaking and crawling about restlessly so I didn't get much sleep.
Anyway, the main thing is that they are home and safe. I am feeling pretty manky myself, I had to keep nipping outside the ward because I didn't want to wake other people's children up with my big honking cough (the other children in there were much sicker than mine, poor little lambs). I wasn't feeling too good on the way back from London anyway, and I now have a cold-sore the size of a small sausage along half my top lip, I can hardly talk, so I am quite looking forward to just having a bath and going to bed.
I won't email/phone anyone tonight because dh needs the PC to catch up on work and I need to collapse in a heap (a few more crap nights coming up!!) but thanks VERY much to everyone who has been concerned about us, it makes such a huge difference to know that people care and have been thinking of us. xxx