Memphis Drama

I got so caught up in getting pics of the Memphis trip onto the blog, that I forgot to mention the dramatic moments of the first couple of days!

We arrived in Memphis on Friday. On Saturday, Jonathan started wheezing. He had a slight runny nose, but nothing impressive, certainly not as bad as other runny noses he has had. No fever, acted normal. He has never wheezed before that I can remember, so it was very strange for him to be wheezing! As the day wore on, his wheezing got worse. Late afternoon, my sister, a pediatric nurse, came over and listened to him breath and wheeze. She suggested breathing treatments to see if that helped. It made sense to me. I knew that if we had been at home, we would have done that already, since that has always been prescribed for breathing issues on the kids.

PROBLEM: I didn't bring the nebulizer or medicine with me! (A nebulizer is a machine that turns liquid medicine into a breathable mist) It never occurred to me that I might need them! So Jodie got us a spacer (which we also had at home and used on Thomas when he was little. It's a plastic tube with a little mask on one end. Medicine comes in an inhaler, like for asthma, and attaches to the other end. Puffs go into the tube to be breathed through the mask.) and the inhaler version of basically the same medicine that we use in the nebulizer.

We gave him a treatment and he did sound better afterwards, but he HATED the treatment! We gave him one more before he went to bed. He slept very poorly, constantly waking up and crying and still wheezing. I brought him in bed with me after awhile and listened to him breath. I tried to give him another treatment in the night, but he just screamed, so I quit. I laid in bed for hours listening to his breathing get worse, and debating whether I needed to get up and take him to the ER because his breathing sounded so awful he couldn't possibly be getting enough oxygen in his body and if I kept waiting he would surely suffocate RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME!!!!!. I had just decided to get up when he suddenly sounded better. He fell asleep and his wheezing got better and better. He slept soundly, and then I fell asleep too. In the morning, he wasn't wheezing at all!

But it started up again after he had been awake a couple hours. Fearing a repeat of yesterday, I decided to take him to a LeBonheur urgent care office. Bud went with me (Thank you again!) and we saw a dr. Jonathan certainly did not ACT sick! His O2 was normal and the dr said the wheezing didn't seem to be in his lungs, although I feel certain it was the night before! He prescribed Orapred and breathing treatments with the spacer just like we had been doing. I was glad of that since I had felt some guilt about giving him medicine that hadn't technically been prescribed for him. (Feel free to chastise me next time we're at the office, Molly!)

He got a breathing treatment at the office and two more later in the day and never wheezed again! Thank goodness! I can guarantee you we will never go on another trip without the breathing medicine!