Life is never boring around here.

Saturday, Tyler woke up with a cough. A pretty bad one. We thought it was a really bad cold and we snuggled him on the couch and gave him some cough medicine. After breakfast, he got to coughing so much that breakfast came right back up. Poor guy. He continued to cough and act like he was sick, and after lunch (which he did not eat) we gave him some more medicine. At that point, I realized that he was breathing really hard and fast and his heart rate was really fast, too. I thought it was the stimulant in the medicine and made Wade go get some pediatric, stimulant free stuff for his next dose. After a dose of that stuff, his breathing did not get any better, so we called the nurse. After describing what was going on, she determined that he would need to come in to be looked at. So I took him in to the after-hours care clinic. When we got there, his oxygen levels were really low, and they started him on a breathing treatment. They started asking me a bunch of questions about asthma. “Has he had any wheezing incidents before?” “Is there any family history of asthma?” “Does he cough at night? During exercise?” They took an x-ray of his lungs, which showed no pneumonia, thank goodness. They said they were going to treat him like he was having an asthma attack since that’s they way his lungs were acting.

So, Saturday night at the after-hours clinic, he did not progress back to normal fast enough, so he earned an ambulance ride to Children’s Hospital. We were in a room by about 2:30 am. At that point he was on a continuous breathing treatment and would be for the entire night. I didn’t get much sleep. Tyler finally did drift off, but when he was asleep, he would pull the mask off of his face and I would have to put it back on. There was about an hour and a half where he slept deep enough that he stopped fighting it.

Sunday was a day of breathing treatments and monitoring oxygen levels and listening to lungs. He was on and off of the oxygen in his nose. The doctors all stopped short of giving him the diagnosis of asthma, but said that it was a complete possibility even without a family history. So we just hung out watching the tube. After lunch, I asked about movies and was shown the movie cabinet. That became our entertainment for the rest of the evening.

And then it was Monday. We were pretty sure that Tyler would come home today. He was feeling better. His lungs were sounding better. His breathing treatments were spacing out to every four hours. The doctors came in around lunchtime to make sure that we would be ok with taking him home and doing the inhaler treatments. I asked this doctor point-blank about his diagnosis. He basically told me that Tyler has asthma. It may be very mild and this might be the only or one of very few episodes he might have. OR this may be the beginning of full blown asthma. We won’t know until this does or does not happen again.

So for now, we are on a preventive regimen. He will be getting the “rescue” inhaler for a day or so more. And then that will be used only in emergencies. The Flovent inhaler will be used twice a day for a while. I’ll know more about how long tomorrow at our follow up visit with the pediatrician.

We are home. Tyler is sleeping. I’ve checked on him once. I’ll probably check a few more times before I head off to sleep myself. This whole experience has just been exhausting. I have so much respect for parents with kids that have chronic health problems. Things like this just put my life into perspective.

Thanks for listening. I’ll update after the doctor’s visit tomorrow.