PORTLAND, Maine — 16-month-old Ozzie slept in a hospital bed that seemed to swallow the small child.
Tubes carrying oxygen plugged his nose. The machine pumping the air made the only sound in the room, save for every few minutes when Ozzie would be jolted awake by a brief coughing fit.
This was not the Ozzie his father, Zach, and mother, Cassidy, knew, as the couple sat on the bed next to him.
"If you knew Ozzie, this is not Ozzie," Cassidy said. "He would be jumping on all of the furniture and trying to climb up, and falling off, and being a typical little boy. But, this is what he's done for, like, a week."
RELATED: RSV isn't only affecting babies
For now, while Cassidy slept next to Ozzie and Zach stayed on the couch nearby, the child is confined to a bed at Maine Medical Center's Barbara Bush Children's Hospital in Portland — fighting Respiratory Syncytial Virus, or RSV.
"When we got here, they were like, 'He's OK; this is what we're seeing,'" Cassidy explained. "He started getting better and, then, he started getting worse. And that went right back to, is my baby gonna die?"
RSV is a common respiratory virus that usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms. But, in children, it can be serious — what's not common is how hard it's hitting Maine right now.
The state's two largest hospital groups, Northern Light Health and MaineHealth, hosted a joint virtual press conference Friday to talk about how Maine saw typical peak-season patient loads in October when they'd expect them in January instead.
"I don't know whether that's just simply shifted and, come January, we're not gonna have much, or whether it's the beginning of something bigger," Dr. Jonathan Wood, from Eastern Maine Medical Center, said.
On Friday, all 87 staffed pediatric beds at Barbara Bush were occupied, and nearly all 37 pediatric beds at Eastern Maine Med in Bangor were full as well.
"Unfortunately, there is no treatment to keep the child from getting the virus or from the virus getting worse, or to cure the virus once the child has gotten it," Dr. Mary Ottolini, who works at Barbara Bush, said. "It's just a matter of supportive care, which we have the capacity, thankfully."
Ottolini added that half of all patients currently admitted at her hospital had a respiratory virus, and the majority of those cases were RSV.
The good news is, hospitals have been fighting RSV for decades, and the doctors said we can limit its spread with the same measures we've gotten used to in the past three years — keep sick children out of school; wash your hands; and get your child a flu shot, as doctors worry about a serious RSV season running into flu season.
Back at Barbara Bush, Ozzie's family hopes to free up his bed soon and head home with their son.