Matthew had a small cough this week, but on Thursday afternoon, he was coughing really hard and like 5-7 times a minute! It was awful! My heart broke a little more every time he coughed…he was just completely miserable! Sometimes, he would hold his breath to try to avoid coughing! So I made an appointment with his pediatrician for Friday. His doctor told me that he had a lot of fluid in his lungs and that it sounded a lot like asthma, but that doesn’t mean that he will have asthma for the rest of his life! So we did a breathing treatment in the office to see if it would help clear up his lungs a little! Matthew really did not enjoy this…he screamed the entire 10 minutes! I’m sure people thought we were torturing him (I sure felt like we were!) The nurses left, thinking that it would help him not to be so scared, but they failed to let me know when it was done! Another nurse came in and looked at it and said, “Oh you’re done!” I was thinking to myself…and how long have we been done for?! Matthew’s face was all red and swollen from screaming for so long! I was a little irritated, but grateful that it was over! The doctor came back in and checked his lungs and said that we needed to take the breathing machine home and do treatments of Albuterol 3 times a day for at least 3 days! (Albuterol is for asthma, but we are really hoping that this won't be a long-term thing!) He told me that we could keep the machine because we would probably need it again…comforting! I wasn’t sure whether to be grateful for the gift or concerned! He also put Matthew on another prescription to relax his muscles because he had been coughing so hard that his whole body was tense! The only problem with that is that this medication lowers his immune system and he could pick up any infection or germ, so we are homebound and no visitors until we are done with that medication is done and Matthew can't leave the house until his cough is much better! Well, we spent 4 hours at the doctors office and Matthew was exhausted from screaming, so he fell asleep in the car and slept for 2 hours! Mommy took a nap too! (We were up at 4am, so I was very tired!)
Matthew has done much better with the breathing treatments at home, but still doesn’t like them so much! We have to put a movie on to distract him, but it’s much better than it was at the doctors office! The breathing mask is affectionately called, Bubbles the fish!
I let Matthew play with the face mask to try and let him see that it’s not so scary…
...now if only he could walk around and do the breathing treatments at the same time!
You can see how tired and sick he feels! His cold seems to get worse by the hour, so I'm crossing my fingers that he doesn't end up with an ear infection too! Any suggestions on how to manage a cold??? We hope and pray that he will get better soon!
3 comments:
Poor little baby...I am so sorry to hear that he is sick. It sure seems like so much is going around. We will keep Matthew in our prayers.
Yeah, Matty is not showing his opinion with his furrowed brow!
He is such a poor thing. He is too little to be so sick.
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