Asthma

Ryan was born the week after Hallowe’en – which is one of my favourite holidays. When I was hugely pregnant with him, I dressed up as a pumpkin and I sure didn’t need to use the crinoline to look round. Another benefit of having a baby near Hallowe’en is that you have a ready-made birthday party theme. Hallowe’en parties are the best – and when you mix it with a birthday party you get presents! Awesome.

One drawback of having a baby in the fall, however, is that they will be developing right in the middle of cold and flu season.

When Ryan was born, my daughter Rebecca was two and had just started going to nursery school a few mornings a week. She thrived at ‘school’…along with every virus known to mankind. We were all sick a lot that fall, and caught a particularly nasty bug after Christmas. Ryan’s cold started out as a runny nose, but gradually his chest got wheezy and it didn’t get better with time. Luckily, we had already been bringing Ryan to a Nurse Practitioner. I called her in the morning, and within a few hours we were sitting in her office. She assessed Ryan and called a paediatrician who agreed to meet us at the emergency department before he started his rounds.

I still remember how the doctor looked when he said, “Ryan has eczema and asthma…in all likelihood he will develop food allergies as well. The writing is on the wall”. I wasn’t overly shocked…after Ryan had developed eczema I had been researching the subject like a fiend and understood that eczema, asthma, and food allergies were often linked as a “triple threat”. The paediatrician decided to admit Ryan for the night so they could stabilize his breathing. I barely held back the tears as I called my husband. Jason left work immediately so that he could look after Rebecca. In my heart, I knew Ryan would be fine…but just the thought that my baby was sick enough to require hospitalization felt awful. We were already dealing with his crazy skin condition, but now asthma. I didn’t even want to think about food allergies...

Through the night Ryan was treated with pediapred (a form of predisone used to treat children and infants with inflammation problems) and ventolin with the nebulizer. While I absolutely hated spending the whole night at the hospital, Ryan was a trooper. Even through his nebulizer treatments, he would look up at his nurse and smile at her. The water vapour made clouds around his little face and he sounded like Darth Vader behind the mask. Ryan responded well to the treatments and we went home the next morning with inhalers in hand.

At first Ryan hated taking the inhalers with his aerochamber mask. It must have felt terrible to him. He would hold his breath and try to wriggle away from the mask; even with my nursing background it felt wrong to be holding a foreign object so tightly over my baby’s face. With time we both became more comfortable with this new routine. Some days were easier than others. For a few days after Ryan was discharged from the hospital, we had to slowly wean him off the Pediapred. This medication came in the form of a horrible tasting liquid, and it was a true Battle Royale to get Ryan to take it. We had to restrain him so that we could get the syringe into his mouth, but he would scream and cry so much that he would eventually throw the medication up. At one point I just couldn’t take it any more. I started sobbing, handed the syringe to Jason and fled to another room. Listening to him choking and crying from the other room wasn’t easier. After 20 seconds I returned, grabbed the syringe back from Jason and said, “Let me do it!” Poor Jason…not only did he have to deal with a sick baby, but a nut-job of a wife as well.

There was only one other time that Ryan had to be admitted to the hospital. His asthma only flared up when he caught a cold, so as soon as his nose started to run we would ramp up his treatment to prevent an asthma attack. And though the Pediapred never became easier to administer, we did enjoy its benefits. Not only did it help to make his lungs more patent, but it made the eczema much more manageable – for a day or two, anyway.

Now if we could have just gotten some sleep...