Under-Reactive

The Saturday before my mom passed away, my older brother called me from her house and told me to come right away "Mom's dying."

"What?" I asked incredulously, "I was just there yesterday."

I realized when I got there, and most of my siblings (those that lived close by anyway) were gathered around her bedside, that the obvious had not been so obvious to me, as I had dealt with her needs and interacted with her a few times a week for the past number of months.

Yesterday I had another one of those experiences. We have three boys that have been diagnosed with asthma from very young ages--Gannon, Aedan and Teagen. At the first diagnosis, when Gannon was three weeks old, I tried to blame these genes on the Hess side. Boy, was I wrong. It was the Hamm's that had the asthma gene--for generations. It had just skipped mine and gone to my children. I don't know if any of my parents' other grandchildren have it. Kind of like the left-handedness half of my children inherited (from the Hamm's also).

We only seem to crack out the inhalers when the boys catch cold, and with Teagen, it is to be expected each and every time.

He started to show signs of a cold at church on Sunday afternoon. Yesterday morning (Wednesday), he woke up with full-blown asthma--his chest was working really hard, and he was grunting at every breath. This was a bit unusual as he usually wheezes--no grunting.

I tried the inhaler they gave us. Dumb thing, if you ask me, to give a child under the age of three an inhaler. You can't get him to hold his head still enough to take six breaths before removing it. The most I could get him to do was two, so it wasn't working, and I didn't want to brace his head and have him screaming to do so. I ended up trying four different times with absolutely no luck.

We walked the kids up to school. He grunted all the way.

When we got home, I decided to get out the nebulizer. This is kind of a big job--get the machine, its tubing and mask, mix the medicine, plug it in, turn it on, and then hold it up in front of his face for about ten minutes. Not a huge deal, but a lot more work than using a little inhaler.

This seemed to work immediately. It only lasted for about 30 minutes or so, and he was back at the grunting thing again.

I had my doctor's appointment yesterday about the sleep thing (more on that later). My friend Christy kept the boys while I went (thanks, Christy. You're the best!). She and I have been watching each other's kids for about the last six years. She's been through the asthma thing with the boys before; never a problem. But, yesterday, just as I was finishing up the appointment, she called to let me know that Teagen sounded bad. She was worried.

I assured her that I was on my way. When I got home with him, I nebulized him again. It didn't make much difference. I put him down for a nap. When he woke up, he was crying inconsolably--very odd for him. I hugged him against me and laid back with him, he said, "Hurts. Hurts," so I let him go. He laid down by himself on his belly and said it again. I decided to nebulize him again, but again, it did no good--still the grunting and the heaving chest.

I realized, at this point, that the doctor told me, with Aedan, that I am supposed to use his steroid inhaler when it gets to the point that I'm using the albuterol inhaler at a certain frequency. I don't have a steroid inhaler for Teagen, so I called Kaiser to find out what my best course of action was--just wanted advice, nothing else. When the nurse heard his symptoms she told me to "Go directly to the emergency room or call 9-1-1." I thought she was kidding. She asked if he was turning blue. He wasn't, but there was no color in his face.

I tried to call Zan at this point, but he had just gone out to help his students at the end of the school day, so I waited for his response, so he could tell me that the nurse was off her rocker, and I didn't have to go. I can always count on Zan to be the voice of reason.

When I finally reached him, he said, "If that's what they've said, then you'd better go." Ugh! Wrong answer. In the meantime, the nurse at Kaiser had called me two more times asking me why I hadn't gone yet and that she was putting it in Teagen's chart.

I waited for Gannon to get home to keep the kids, and I left. We arrived at about 4:15pm. They got us right into a room. They gave Teagen a double dose of albuterol in a nebulizer and some prednisone. After the prednisone, he was feeling darn good. Good enough to jump on the bed and all over the room. Suddenly, life was good.

They took us down to have his chest x-rayed. We got to wear matching lead aprons. Teagen thought that was very cool (just like when we make cookies). The x-ray revealed a little bit of cloudiness in one lung, but they assumed that to be viral. Don't you just love that word?--that's the word for ride it out and suffer silently.

They discharged us. Teagen seemed as good as new. So, for now, he gets nebulized every four hours and takes prednisone once a day for four days; that means four days of jumping all over the house--yeehaw! We'll go see his doctor on Monday. Strange thing was he'd just been in to see her for a well-child check on Monday.

So, as this all occurred, I wondered if I was really under-reacting. Did I not see the obvious because I deal with all the day-to-day care of these children?

Today, I was called by Kaiser employees three separate times to check on Teagen's status (I love Kaiser). As I got to chatting with one of them, I exposed the fact that I have six kids and three with asthma. She said, "Oh then, you know what you're doing."

I've realized that as I deal with many things at this point in life, I breathe deeply, grit my teeth and plunge forward, not getting too reactive about anything. But in doing so, I wonder, am I growing too numb?