June 20, 2011
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Asthma attack.
The patient.
My son has struggled with asthma most of his life which culminated in an eleven day stay in the pediatric intensive care unit and a small surgery on his lung. When we moved out to the countryside, away from the busy street where we had been living, his symptoms subsided dramatically and by the time he was 6, his pediatrician declared he no longer had the asthma diagnosis.
And then, this morning happened. He’s been suffering from what we thought was allergies for a couple weeks and last night out of nowhere, he spiked a temp and was breathing fast and shallow. And this morning… this morning it became obvious he needed to be seen immediately. I called into work and stayed home. Luckily, his doctor was available first thing so we didn’t have to go through the ER but as soon as she listened to him, you could see from the look on her fact that it was bad. There is a lot of wheezing. He’s not getting enough oxygen. He sounds like he has pneumonia. Then she turned on her heel and was back in less than 30 seconds with a nebulizer and meds and there he was, all hooked up like we had never stopped doing this.
And after a few minutes, he looked so much better, was breathing so much easier and I thought, “Oh my god. How did I miss this?”
I asked her that very question, I reminded her that this very office had informed me that I DID NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT THE ASTHMA ANYMORE and she looked at me and glibly said, “Well, you know, we’ve been seeing a string of these cases crop up where latent asthma can just rear its head due to these certain viruses that are going around. Did he get a flu shot?”
No, no he didn’t get the fucking flu shot. Maybe if I thought he still had asthma, I would have considered it. Instead, he’s been oxygen deprived for probably a week now and is in the early stages of pneumonia because OH YEAH TURNS OUT HE STILL HAS ASTHMA.
Then she asked me what I’d been doing for his symptoms, if he’d been hitting his inhaler every couple of hours or how often did I think he’d been on it and I wanted to scream, “HE DOESN’T HAVE A FUCKING INHALER BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T PRESCRIBE HIM ONE!”
Instead, I said that without screaming and without the f-word. She just smiled and nodded.
Anyway, we went and picked up all the usual goodies. The antibiotics, the steroids, the nebulizer meds…
And he’s going to be fine. And that’s what’s important. I just thought we’d gotten lucky, that he was over this. Lesson learned.
So we’ve spent most of the day hanging out on the couch. After a few more breathing treatments, he’s been perking up and acting like his old self, thank God. So we’ll see how tomorrow goes.
