So, this past Sunday was Tova's ninth birthday. It was also the day she had her first attack of what seems asthma-like. In the morning, she had a party at this place where you paint on plaster castings. She was dancing around, having the time of her life.
After it was over, we went to Target, and she bought herself a DS with the giftcards she'd gotten and the money she's been saving for the past 6 months. And then we went to Borders, because she got a giftcard for there as well.
The kids' section is upstairs, so we went up the steps. And Tova collapsed at Havah's feet. She could barely get a breath. We took her to the ER, and they gave her a nebulizer treatment (albuterol) with straight oxygen and monitored her blood oxygen, which was down around 90-92. When they took her off, she settled down at around 95-96, and we went home. With an inhaler, and a prescription for steroids (not anabolic, so her future career in MLB is safe).
She's used the inhaler about once a day since then. And this morning, her breathing was labored, she was hacking coughing, and her cheeks were bright red. We don't know why, but that's a symptom she gets when this happens. Maybe her blood vessels are expanding to try and get oxygen?
So we went to get her inhaler, and it wasn't in her backpack. Seems she must have left it at school yesterday. School being a 45 minute bus ride away. Two hours of driving to get there and back at this time of the morning. So we called her doctor and got him to call in a new prescription to the pharmacy.
The woman at the pharmacy told me it would be 15 minutes, which would have gone to about 5 minutes after the bus left. But she did it in 7 minutes. So I called Havah and asked her if she thought the bus might wait, and she called a friend of ours who's a teacher at the school and rides the bus and asked her if they could hold the bus for a minute. We were racing towards the bus stop, and as we were talking to our friend, we saw the bus pulling out. But she had the driver pull over to the side, I did a very stupid U-Turn-ish kind of thing, while Havah got Tova to take a couple of sucks from the inhaler, and she got on the bus. Sans lunch, which got left in the car, but they'll give her something at school.
This was after a fun night when I woke at three thinking that I heard her gasping. I went into her room, and she wasn't gasping or wheezing, but had had a bad dream. Maybe I heard her waking from that. It took an hour to get her back to sleep after that, so even given my normal morning sluggishness, this was an extra-sluggish morning.
Gah. I'm so friggin' tired.
Posted by Sterling (Member # 8096) on :
Sympathies. I hope someone can figure out a diagnosis if it isn't asthma.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Is it possible that she inhaled some plaster, or mold spores within the plaster?
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
The timing of this (spring) also suggests the possibility of a pollen allergy. Have the pollen counts been high in your area? It might be worth taking her to an allergist.
Posted by Lisa (Member # 8384) on :
That's an interesting idea. Pollen. She does get all snuffly from pollen. And she developed a cat allergy about 6-9 months ago. When we go to friends' houses who have cats, we give her Benadryl, but that doesn't mean she mightn't have inhaled some dander. My first thought when I realized what was going on was the paint fumes. But there are too many variables.
They said they won't call it asthma with only one attack like this. But they definitely think it's asthma-like. I wish my uncle (an allergist) wasn't retired...
Posted by Liz B (Member # 8238) on :
My cat allergies gradually got worse as I got older, to the point now that I avoid them completely and carry albuterol in case I'm around them and don't know it (darn people with their clean, non-cat-smelling houses!). I have no other asthma symptoms at any other time, other than some very very very mild exercise-induced asthma if I'm exercising in the cold/ suddenly go inside. I'm lucky that my trigger is so easy to avoid.
As for cat dander--at least for me, when friends who have cats come to visit, I have to vacuum the places where they sat, launder any blankets they used, etc. Have you visited a cat house recently, and did you take anything fabric that she might have been exposed to in the morning?
Anyway, just told that story to support the idea that it might be an allergy that is gradually getting worse. Like you said, way too many variables. Hope you can narrow it down.
I do hope it turns out to be NOT asthma and something that can easily be addressed/ fixed.
Posted by dabbler (Member # 6443) on :
Just checking: make sure you have a spacer ordered and are using it properly. You don't want her to swallow the medication, it needs to be properly inhaled to be useful.
Posted by Lisa (Member # 8384) on :
By spacer, I assume you're talking about the aerochamber thingie that you stick on the end of the inhaler? Definitely. She can't do it correctly without that.
Posted by Goody Scrivener (Member # 6742) on :
Lisa, I've also been extremely wheezy and short of breath recently. Much more than normal at this time of year. I do have seasonal allergies and a family history of asthma, although I haven't yet been diagnosed with asthma myself. I'm actually hoping this is bad allergies and that Tova and I are going through the same mess.
Posted by Lisa (Member # 8384) on :
And you're in the Chicago area too, right? So maybe that does have something to do with it.
Posted by romanylass (Member # 6306) on :
I'm sorry. Asthma is never fun, and double that when it's your kid.
Posted by andi330 (Member # 8572) on :
Asthma is not fun and can be downright scary. That said, if the doctors even suspect that Tova has asthma, I would ask for a referral to a pulminologist. My asthma went undiagnosed for months, because many GPs aren't familiar with all of the variations that asthma can take, and assumed that I was just experiencing worse than usual allergies. The fact that the same doctor's office had prescribed me multiple allergy medications that were having no effect didn't concern them. When I had my first major attack and ended up in the emergency room two nights in a row my regular doctor (not the GPs I saw when I was away at school) gave me a referral to a pulminologist and he was extremely angry that I had gone undiagnosed for so long. He felt that it should have been, if not obvious to the doctors that I had asthma, at least obvious that I needed to be seen by someone with more expertise.
I got treatment, and got it under control. In the spring I still have difficulty with the higher pollen levels, but otherwise I'm fine most of the time.
Posted by Sala (Member # 8980) on :
I had an interesting experience this spring that you might want to consider. With the advent of spring I started my usual allergy stuff. But then it suddenly got worse. None of my medication could control it very long. I would wake up totally filled up in my head and I had trouble sleeping and started getting dark circles under my eyes. It just kept getting worse and worse. I'd never experienced my allergies like this before. Then one day I was in the shower and it came to me -- two weeks before I had put a new bedspread on my bed to reflect the change of seasons and less need for a heavy comforter. And it was two weeks ago that my allergies started to get so bad. And what was worse, I had spring break from school (I'm a teacher) and I often felt so bad that I'd go take a nap -- right in the middle of the new bedspread. And I never got any better. I took the bedspread off of my bed, and put the old one back on. That night I slept wonderfully and woke up without hardly any head stuff! And I've gotten better and better this whole week without that bedspread around. When I felt bad I was actually compounding the problem by sleeping in the material that was causing the problem!
You might want to think about things like that bedspread that might have changed recently due to seasonal changes.
Posted by Goody Scrivener (Member # 6742) on :
Lisa, how is Tova doing now? My breathng has gotten a lot easier and the nasty goop has thinned out. Hopefully her symptoms have lessened as well.
Posted by Lisa (Member # 8384) on :
It's like nothing ever happened. The last time she had to use the inhaler was last Thursday morning. We almost used it Thursday night, but ever since then, she's been completely back to normal, thank God.
I'm glad you're doing better. It sounds like you had a worse time of it than she did.
We're keeping the inhaler around anyway, just in case.