Everyone's OK

You always have to open with "everyone's OK" when you're telling a story about a trip to the emergency room.

Last night at 8:00 or so, I heard Ryan struggling to breathe. His chest could be heard whistling from across the room. I displayed that uncanny maternal grasp of the obvious by asking "are you having trouble breathing," and the answer was a wheezy "yes." We looked for his inhaler and couldn't find it. Compassion was briefly replaced by irritation at that point, but it quickly passed. In spending a few minutes with him it immediately became obvious that he was really struggling to get oxygen, much more so than during a normal asthma attack. Mira started crying, worried about her brother, and Ryan looked pretty scared.

I looked online for the nearest ER that accepted his health insurance and we headed out. The kids had spent the night at their dad's apartment Saturday night, and as the story unfolded it turned out Ryan slept on the cat-hair covered chair and woke up with his breathing compromised. He didn't tell anyone though. The way it works for him is he has a little trouble breathing and takes shallow breaths. The more he takes those shallow breaths the more difficult it gets for him to breathe at all. If I catch it as soon as he starts having difficulty I can coach him through enough deep breathing to get his lungs to open up without a trip to the doctor. If it gets to the point it was last night, which it has done only once or twice before, there's nothing to be done but head immediately to the nearest doctor. Since it was Sunday evening, that meant going to the ER. There was no way he was going to make it through the night without breathing treatments.

We got there at 8:24, and there were five or six people ahead of us in the lobby. Apparently triage protocol demands that children who are having trouble breathing get immediate treatment, because they took him in immediately ahead of everyone else and treated him before getting any information whatsoever from us other than his name. Only after he'd had two breathing treatments did someone come in and get our insurance information, address, etc. We were completely finished and walking out the door by 10:00.

As ER visits go, this one was very low on the drama scale and had a happy ending. Still, it may be a while before either child is willing to spend the night at their dad's apartment again.