We are thankful for nebulizers

Thanksgiving kind of petered out around here, and I feel like we need a couple days to recover from the weekend.

Thursday A was very sick with a head cold, so sick he couldn't sleep. We didn't do our fancy Thanksgiving dinner because A and I both felt like crap. C spent Thursday night holding A upright so he could try and sleep. It didn't really work. A and I both got sick enough from coughing Wednesday night that we both threw up. I spent most of the night on the couch so I could sleep.

By Friday morning, A was lethargic and not breathing really well, so I called the doctor's office when they opened. They didn't have any appointments until 1:20PM.

"Well," I said, "I guess the emergency room wouldn't see us before then if we left now and I'd rather he saw you guys."

"Just come on in," she said. "Bring him in and we'll look at him." We were there about twenty minutes later.

If you've ever waited at a doctor's office, you'll appreciate how serious it is when you show up and are immediately shown to a room and have a nurse come in to take an oxygen reading, about 92-93%. The nurse then says, "The doctor will be right with you; you're next."

Then the doctor comes in, not our regular one but one we like, the one who makes jokes and plays with the kids, although A is not interested in playing at all. A gets three albuterol treatments, one with oxygen. After second, the doctor prepares us that if the third treatment doesn't have a measurable effect, A will be spending the night in the hospital.

But it does work. We're given a scary list of things to watch for changes that indicate A needs to be hospitalized immediately (color, shoulders, belly, the hollow at the base of his throat), we're sent home with the nebulizer and prescriptions for albuterol and steriods, with instructions to treat him every two hours through the day and night andcome back tomorrow for a check-up. Diagnosis is bronchiolitis, with the definite possibility that he has asthma on the horizon.

We go to the drugstore. We get a boatload of albuterol. We give him treatments every two hours. He hates it. He cries and yells. But he is breathing and smiling and getting more towards his normal self. He sleeps more that night.

Saturday, we get to see our actual doctor. She says to decrease the frequency to every four to six hours and come back for a check-up next week.

Now he seems a lot better, although he still does not care for the treatments. We spent the rest of our weekend (Saturday afternoon-Sunday) doing errands, cleaning up the vomit from the rug (which still smells, sigh), getting and putting up a Christmas tree.

So what am I thankful for? Air. Being able to breathe. A getting better. Good doctors. The nurse who heard the tension in my voice and got us in without an appointment. A husband who spent many nights sitting up with a sick boy so I could sleep. A boy who is sleeping, finally.

Lastly, I am thankful for our health insurance, because I'm pretty sure the line-item for that visit would have been in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars, including the equipment we were sent home with. A's life literally depended on the treatments he received. They weren't optional or elective. And we came home only worried about his recovery, not how we were going to pay for a staggering doctor's bill. We're worried about him having asthma, but we're not making financial decisions based on paying for a possible future chronic health problem out of pocket. I can't imagine how making any parent worry about finances when their kids are sick makes this a better country.