The Scariest Day - For Real This Time

I thought all our excitement for the week (or even month!) was over on Monday. But then on Wednesday, Sweetheart woke up with a runny nose and cough, and it didn't take long before she was wheezing. She wasn't doing that great, so I grabbed her inhaler.

Have you ever tried to get a 3-year-old to use an inhaler? It's not that easy, let me tell you, even with the special spacer and mask the doctor gave us. Once I finally pinned her to the ground and made her do it she immediately seemed to do so much better. For like 5-10 minutes. When I could see it just wasn't working and I could see just how hard she was having to work in order to breathe, I asked Marquis to come home from work so we could take her in. We ended up going to an urgent care place where they looked her over and said that her lungs sounded awful, and they gave her a nebulizer breathing treatment.

She did so good with the treatment. I think she just felt so much better so fast that she was content to just sit still and let it do it's thing. They watched her there for about another hour before they let us go home. They also arranged for us to have a nebulizer brought to our house, which is a good thing because just a couple of hours later she got bad again. We hung in there long enough for the nebulizer to be delivered, but it was getting bad enough that we were ready to take her in again if it hadn't shown up right when it did.

I think it's so cute how the mask pulls her little ears down! It can't be too comfortable, but again I think that it made her feel so much better so fast that she didn't care. Of course, just an hour later she was getting so bad again, and we knew something more needed to be done. We decided not to pull any punches, and we took her to the emergency room at Primary Children's Hospital. They gave her another breathing treatment that was a triple dose of the stuff she'd already had twice that day, along with two doses of another breathing medicine. They also gave her some oral steroids. We were there about four hours, and by the end she was still wheezing a teeny bit, but so, so much better than the entire rest of the day.

One thing I learned about this type of medication is that it makes the kids wired, and twitchy. She was so twitchy with this extra powerful dose that I almost wondered if she was going to have a seizure. On the other hand, she was also so tired at this point that she just zoned in front of the TV. When we finally left it was about 9:30 at night, but we hadn't had dinner yet and so we stopped and grabbed some dinner at a fast food place (which we never do) and the poor girl scarfed it. She was so hungry! She was also really beat from having to work so hard to breathe all day, so as soon as we got her in bed she was out like a light. I was up several times in the night standing over her bed listening to her breathe (doesn't that sound creepy?), but she was finally over it. We had to do nebulizer treatments every 4 hours for the next two days, but now she is back to normal. And I decided that my scary day on Monday was nothing compared to being stressed and on edge the entire day on Wednesday.

Really, I know that both these days was nothing. They were tougher than my usual, boring day, but really both girls were fine both days, there are much more scary things that could have happened to us. I am just so very grateful that we live now, when we have the technology, medical and otherwise, that we do. We truly are very blessed to live here and now!