Asthma Woes

Joseph decided Papa was having all the fun at the ER these last couple months so he decided he wanted to go investigate the new hospital that just opened a couple months ago. Well, him deciding wouldn't be accurate, his asthma however decided to flare and make a winter appearance which resulted in the visit to the ER. This new hospital is a Primary Children's addition and is just around the corner from us. We walked in around 10:30 p.m. and was in a room within about 15 minutes. Pretty speedy service I would say, then again a child with respiratory problems usually speeds up the process.

They took his picture at sign-in which is new for us and the triage nurse was great. The doctor was excellent and checked everything, even ordering chest x-rays to make sure pneumonia wasn't setting in. Joseph loved the wheelchair ride and the x-ray tech was lots of fun. They gave him a new steroid that has shown to help both asthma attacks and croup, which is what he was presenting with at the time, as opposed to our usual stand by steroid of prednisone. However, its side effect is hyperactivity and combined with the Albuterol that we gave him before going to the hospital which also causes hyperactivity you can imagine Joseph was buzzing. Normally we can handle this but at 1 am its a little hard when you are trying to calm him down to go to sleep once we got home. The doctor wanted to keep him for a few hours to monitor him but with us just living up the street and it being so late we opted to go home. His O2 stats were good and we've been doing this for some time now that we felt we could handle things at home once the steroid was taken so the doctor gave us the choice.

This is his first trip to the ER this winter which is a marked improvement over last year. I think by this time last year we had at least 3. This is surprising considering how many germs we've picked up this year from school. We credit this to being away from the mold in OR and that he's on two different asthma drugs this year. It would just be nice if his asthma attacks would show themselves during regular office hours during the week and not in the middle of the night and usually on weekends. Doesn't it understand we're trying to live on a budget??????