Asthma

We've discovered that Tyler has asthma. Poor kid has been put on a nebulizer for breathing treatments 7 times in 10 months. The first time in May 2008, the 6th time was just 3 weeks ago before we left for Cabo and the last one is currently going on right now.

Chad was working in Long Beach last week, staying with my sister, and Tyler and I drove out on Tuesday afternoon to surprise him and stay the night with everyone. Ty slept in the guest room, no big deal, only my sister and Cris have 2 cats, and the guest room is pretty much the cats hang out. Well he woke up on Wednesday morning with a runny nose, a bit of a cough and a little sneezy. We thought it was do to the weather change and everything and possibly something to do with the cats. Symptoms continued through to Thursday and then Friday morning he woke up with the same symptoms but a little wheezy. We still had the nebulizer medicine left from a few weeks ago so I gave him a treatment and off to work I went, leaving Tyler with Chad for the day. Chad called me around 2 saying Ty had been miserable all day and was having a hard time breathing, even after doing another treatment around lunchtime. I called the Dr's and met the 2 of them there about an hour later. Poor Tyler looked 10x worse than when I left him just a few hours prior (same thing that just happened a few weeks ago). They did a treatment right away in the office and monitored him for the next 45 minutes or so there. We were then sent over to JFK to get a chest xray done to make sure he didn't have pneumonia since his lungs still sounded pretty wet and flemmy. X-ray turned out clear so that was good but all in all, we believe Tyler has asthma, which is triggered by allergies and he most likely has a severe cat allergy that triggered it this time. Going untreated for a couple of days will make it turn into this... He's finishing out the breathing treatments right now for the next few days until his chest clears up, as well as taking an oral steroid that is making him super irritable and cranky... I can't wait to have my happy and healthy baby back after all of this!! We're testing out an allergy medicine right now that he'll take everyday for the next couple of months to see if it lessens the frequency of having to go on treatments and if it does, then there is a link!! Good news now that we have a way to prevent and treat this so he's not sick (or at least sounding sick) all the time! Pediatric allergists won't test on kids younger than 2 so until then we're just waiting to see what happens with the preventative medicine...

Tyler has been such a trooper through all of this though and takes the treatments as well as a one year old could. I'll keep you posted...