Health Woes

Obviously there hasn’t been any blogging going on lately, which isn’t to say that things have been quiet on the Fiona front. Actually, it’s the sheer number of things that have been going on that have kept this blog from being updated.

As is typical for a one-year old who is in her first year at day care, Fiona has had a lot of colds throughout the winter and early spring. The colds were usually accompanied by a hacking cough, which we didn’t pay any special attention to until mid-April when the coughing started getting so violent that Fiona was unable to hold down food. A trip to the doctor led to us taking Fiona in for a chest x-ray (not a fun thing to do with a 16-month old) to eliminate the possibility of pneumonia. The good news was that the x-ray was clear. The bad news was that the doctor believed the most likely diagnosis was asthma.

We put Fiona on albuterol and pediatric prednisone to fight the inflammation, and within a few days her coughing subsided and her breathing returned to normal. We were very glad to be done with the prednisone, since it has a side-effect of turning the taker cranky. When a thirtysomething asthmatic (like, oh, say, Fiona’s father) is taking prednisone, you can at least point out what’s going on in an effort to calm the hostility. With a baby, you’re stuck with her hostile moods.

With the attack over, we’re now keeping Fiona on management meds, which means she has to take an inhaler a few times a day (and, yes, her day care providers are able to give her the inhaler). Thankfully, we don’t have to wake Fiona up to give her any doses. We do have to monitor any colds she gets because we have to up her meds at the first sign of a cough.

Now, as to whether or not Fiona really has asthma: it’s impossible to know for sure in a child under three years old. Her father has it and she lives in a city with a fair amount of pollution, both of which would argue for the possibility. On the other hand, sometimes young children don’t grow in perfect proportion, so Fiona’s lungs could be trailing behind the rest of her body, and certain types of childhood asthma can disappear as early as the age of three or four (though it isn’t true that childhood asthma almost always wanes in adulthood). We have to treat her as though she’s asthmatic, but thankfully modern medicine has advanced enough that it’s not like Fiona’s being sentenced to a sedentary lifestyle. Not that she has any interest in being sedentary, as anybody who’s met her knows.

So her health kept us so busy I didn’t really have time to blog. And then in a second slam, once Fiona’s health started improving, I wound up coming down with pneumonia myself (my chest x-ray wasn’t so clear) and taking to bed for a week. Big props to Mommy, for picking up a lot of extra slack around the house while I was infirm, and also to Grandma, Grandpa and Aunt Kathy for stopping by on the weekend to help out and picking Fiona up from day care on days when Mommy couldn’t. Support networks are essential.