Lesson Learned

I now have three kids with asthma..



Attitude King was recently diagnosed. That one , quite frankly, came out of left field. No one in our family has asthma so when he complained of chest pains over and over- we tested heart stuff.. We've got lots of heart issues in the family. After a clean bill of health in the heart dept., a breathing test was finally done- just in case. He got to climb into a fun glass phonebooth type thing and breath various ways. Sounds like fun , huh?!

Once the diagnosis came thru, a friend commented to me- "I'm surprised you didn't catch that! After all Drool Prince & Baby Bug both have asthma".. ahh well, I'm not Mom of the Year for nothing.. Besides DP & BB have a family history of asthma, that's my excuse.. lol!

With three kids (ironically all the boys.. hmm) now dx with asthma- you'd think their regiments might be similar.. right? uhmm no..
Attitude King is on a new Atrovent (?) 2x daily for preventative & the lovely tasting Albuterol for rescue.
Baby Bug is on Flovent inhaler 2xdaily for preventative & Albuterol (in neb. form) for rescue.
Drool Prince is on Pulmicort & Albuterol (both via nebulizer)1xdaily for preventative & additional albuterol for rescue.

Hmm.. They all have different drs handling their asthma so I suppose that accounts for part of it. DP's dr doesn't feel inhalers work well for little kids , thus the nebulizer (he does have an inhaler for traveling times). BB's dr thinks inhalers are fine (thus a 7mo on an inhaler) and understands that it's easier to get a baby to sit still for 2 minutes of inhaler twice a day than 10-20mins of nebulizer twice a day.

Drool Prince's asthma seems to be getting a bit uncontrolled lately. Lots of dry coughing, not sure if it's an increase in allergy issues or what but it has to be annoying to him! Because of this, we've moved up to the "yellow" zone on his Asthma treatment program. Which means nebulizer treatments every 4hrs. He's done nebulizer treatments for almost 2yrs now, so it's nothing new to him. He knows how to sit there, be a good boy and just take it like a man. His treatments normally take 10-15mins and with 4 other kids at home today, I don't always get to sit right there. I keep him within eyesight as he sits at the table doing his treatment, but I'm most likely feeding the baby, taking dishes to the sink, cleaning off the table or Something.. And that's when I learned the lesson :

Never leave a juice cup within reach when Drool Prince is doing his neb. treatment.. Apparently he thinks it's great fun to dump some of his juice into his neb. cup & inhale that too.. I mean come on, 2 meds aren't enough.. Let's add some strawberry kiwi juice to the mix! Yum..

Lesson learned..