LaLaGirl – Twinfinite Chaos! Parenting Multiples and Dealing with Autism

Have you ever heard of Reactive Airway Disease? I hadn’t either, until a year or so ago when our son got this horrific cough that wouldn’t go away. It’s basically just like asthma, except instead of being ongoing, the symptoms come and go and it’s usually triggered by a cold virus. The kids have been passing a cold bug back and forth, and it finally made its way to the boy. So, for days now, we’ve been doing round-the-clock nebulizer treatments and having him sleep in a humid room. Old hat. Easy cheesy. We’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, every time he gets sick, and it usually passes in a day or two.

Not this time! The other night, Pablo coughed literally all night long. Paul and I were up with him, worried, and I started counting the seconds between his coughs, like I was trying to find out how far away the lightning strike was from me. He was coughing on average, every twenty seconds. Poor kid! And NOTHING helped. We did the nebulizer, I buttered him up with Vicks Vaporub, we had the humidfier going on high, I even gave him the strong cough meds I usually save for emergency situations: Prescription Cheratussin with Codeine! It didn’t do a thing for my poor child.

I rattled off an email to Kaiser at about 4 in the morning, right before Pablo FINALLY stopped coughing and fell asleep. They asked us to come in promptly at nine. Paul pointed out to me that middle-of-the-night emails work WAY better than calling in and sitting on hold for half an hour!

Pablo’s oxygen level was at 90. I thought that sounded pretty good! That’s an A, right? I guess not. Even at our elevation, they wanted him to be above 96. They gave him a nebulizer treatment at the office and then informed us of the new plan: Prednisone!

We tried Prednisone a few years ago when Pablo was too frightened of the nebulizer, and it sucked ASS. It turned him into this psychotic, paranoid, hyped up little toddler. I was NOT looking forward to trying it out again, but…it seems to be doing the trick. Pablo’s still coughing here and there, but no more of that all-night-long business. And he is a bit agitated, but honestly – we’re on spring break, it’s cold as hell outside, and everyone’s sick. I’M a bit agitated!

Fingers crossed that the sun’ll come out tomoooorroooooow, the kids will get better, we can stop the steroids, and manage a trip to the museum before school starts again!

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Whew, what a night we had with Pablo. The boy has had the worst cough. It’s just relentless. He’s been coughing for over a week now, and yesterday, it seemed like he was doing better. He really didn’t cough much all day. Around dinnertime, though, he started to cough, and then he couldn’t STOP. He coughed violently for almost two straight hours, literally without stopping for more than a few seconds. He coughed until he vomited three different times. And we tried everything to get him to stop – we gave him water, we gave him juice, we gave him a saline neb treatment. We gave him cough medicine. We rubbed Vicks on him. We gave him albuterol in his nebulizer. It all seemed to make him WORSE!

Paul and I decided that one of us should take him to the ER, since he couldn’t seem to get his coughing or his breathing under control. I called Kaiser and they transferred me to a nurse at Children’s Hospital. She listened to him over the phone and said we should hang up and call 911 and have paramedics assess his breathing before bringing him in, since we live about 20 miles from the hospital and it would be a fairly long trip for him in that condition. So that’s what we did. And of course, it’s a nice Sunday night, and all our neighbors are outside hanging out and playing and stuff, and a firetruck and ambulance came to our house with lights and everything. I was worried for a minute how that was going to go, since we have Vonage VOIP phone service, and it’s been said that their 911 service sometimes doesn’t work. I guess they got our address noted correctly, because we had paramedics at our house four minutes after I called. That’s nice to know, in case we ever have a real, life threatening emergency.

So the paramedics came in and evaluated Pablo. They advised us to transport him in the ambulance, and of course, that was an issue since one of us had to ride in the ambulance and one of us had to drive. Kayley had to step up and be a real big girl last night and take all the girls upstairs and put them to bed and wait for grandma to come over and stay with her. We had our neighbor and his wife come over and hang out for the fifteen minutes or so it took for my mom to get there, so she wasn’t alone. Still, I know she was freaked out and scared for Pablo.

In the ambulance, the paramedic gave Pablo another albuterol treatment, and he coughed violently the entire time. We stopped that and she put an oxygen mask on him, and within a minute or so, he stopped coughing for the first time in hours. A few minutes later, he fell asleep in my arms. I’m starting to wonder if he’s developed some allergy or something to the albuterol? We got to the ER and had doctors waiting for us, and as they checked Pablo out, he seemed to be calming right down. So, it was a whole lot of drama, for nothing really. We sat in the ER for hours, waiting around for the doctor, who really couldn’t tell us anything. They did a chest x-ray to rule out pneumonia and to rule out something being caught in his windpipe. He doesn’t have either one of those things going on. We were starting to worry about pneumonia because he was running a low-grade fever. They wrote us up a prescription for cough medicine with codeine, and we were on our way home at about 1 a.m.

On the way home, Pablo started coughing again. We put him to bed and he coughed for about 20 minutes, and then fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion, I’m assuming. It’s so incredibly frustrating, not being able to help him, and not having medical professionals be able to do a damned thing for him, either.

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