Well I am feeling like a terrible mom today. About two months ago Abbie got a cough/cold. The fever and runny nose went away and the cough tamed from the croupy bark to dry coughing at night occasionally. I had been told by several people that sometimes coughs just take awhile to disappear in kids so I wasn't worried.
Unfortunately though over the last couple of weeks the barking seal returned in the evenings and this week it joined us during the daytime. By this week, I didn't worry too much because we had Abbie's two-year check up on Friday so I thought I'd wait until then. Well immediately the doctor told me she was wheezing and needed a breathing treatment.(This is where they put something like an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth and she breathes in some medication to open her lungs.) Abbie has reactive airway disorder(RAD) (basically the technical name for wheezing (What? Wheezing isn't good enough for a medical dictionary?). If it becomes chronic it will be asthma but not yet - thankfully. By the end of the visit we were fitted to buy the nebulizer (the machine that vaporizes the medication), a mask, additional medication, liquid medication, (and the new epi-pens just to add to the bill) and told that she needed the breathing treatments every 4-6 hours and had to take the most disgusting medication known to children twice a day. Needless to say it has been a longer than normal night.
After the peanut incident this is not nearly as worrisome - it just makes me feel guilty I didn't take her in sooner and feel bad at how she is feeling (although she is acting fine, unless we try to give her the medication).
5 comments:
Oh no! Poor Abbie! Aren't we hard on ourselves as Moms? If you go in for every little thing you seem paranoid, if you wait they might get sicker. What can you do? Hope she gets better soon!
I am so sorry. As a mom you never know if you are over-reacting or under. I have gone in twice for regular check-ups and have been told my kids is really sick. (Dax had bronchitus when he was 4 months old, no fun) I hope she feels better.
Poor thing. We went through all of that with Sydney's asthma (not worrying when we really should have, worrying too much when we didn't need to). It sucks. Hopefully this isn't something she'll need to be on long term. or is it? I just remember sydney HATING the nebulizer and the meds at first. But as she's grown it's fine. Don't beat yourself up. It's part of parenting that sometimes you just don't know what to do!
We had teh same thing with Allie... you never can tell when it comes to coughing. Allie hated the meds, but she is used to them now, and doesn't have any problem with them now.
Ditto to what everyone else said. Who said mothering was easy? No mother that I know. Those health decisions have got to be one of the hardest to make. She is a healthy young lady. I would never have guessed what was going on by how she acted, even without the binky.
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