As a young child, I had terrible asthma. Lucky for me, I outgrew it (mostly) and now have an inhaler that usually expires before it ever runs out. There weren't as many good treatments then as there are now, so my sainted parents spent a lot of time at emergency rooms and/or sitting outside my room making sure I was still breathing. Fun stuff. I mention this now because Connery has gone from what seemed at first to be a mild case of asthma to something quite a bit more serious. And I'm really pissed off.
On Thursday at noon, we got a call from his school telling us that he was coughing and getting upset. He had been coughing when he got up that morning, and I chalked it up to being a day late restarting his maintenance medication. By the time I got to school, he was pretty miserable, and the emergency inhaler wasn't doing much. We went home and did his nebulizer, but that didn't help much either.
It's only when the tools you have fail to work that the panic sets in. By 9:30 that night, he had done four nebulizer treatments with two different solutions, taken some children's ibuprofen, had Vick's Vapo-Rub smeared on the bottom of his feet (don't ask), tried a half a dose of liquid poison children's cough medicine, and been administered the Malcolm family cold-washcloth-around-the-neck treatment. Nothing was helping. So we bundled him off to the Emergency Room--an experience that always makes us glad to live in a small, boring town that only needs six chairs in its waiting room--and hoped for the best.
The ER doctor was the same one who had seen him back in April when we figured out that maybe this wasn't so much "mild" asthma. She was very reassuring as she ran through the various tests, and she ultimately decided to put him on a course of steroids, which she handed to us to take home and give him. At the time I thought to myself, why shouldn't we just give him the drugs now, at the hospital? All that became clear just minutes later in the kitchen of our house. PediaPred--the Only Children's Steroid Guaranteed To Taste Like 100% Ass!--was not too popular. He spit the first dose out (onto the leather daybed--note to self: medicine should not be given in formal living room. and also: duh.) and when I tried to re-administer it, he took three very brave gulps and proceeded to throw up the steroids and the entire contents of his stomach.
Wheeeee! Now we were having some fun!
It is really one of those rare and amazing things for which I should just thank My God and move along, but until that moment, some four years into our relationship, Connery had never actually thrown up on me. Baby spit up, yes (oh yes. and with such enthusiasm!) but never actual solid food badness.
Again with the karma, though. One of those limited treatments for my childhood asthma was a yellow medicine--I know not what it was, though it could have been steroids--the bad taste of which I can still summon up, even though I'm certain I haven't had a dose of the stuff in going on 30 years. I couldn't have been much more than three or four, but I remember the wheedling, cajoling, and bribing that my parents had to do to get me to take that nasty stuff. There was something about Lifesavers Candy, for sure. And I know there were many, many instances of their getting the stuff down my gullet only to face a little Exorcist action. My parents had wall-to-wall carpet. I apologize profusely, some 30 years too late.
We did eventually get Connery's meds in him, and by midnight, his cough had already loosened. Crisis averted. In the morning, we called our regular doctor's office, and the nurse there said that the barf-o-rama was why they never prescribed Pedia-Pred. They called me in some pleasantly flavored Ora-Pred, and things have been much better since.
The thought that Connery could have to be on this maintenance medication for the foreseeable future is disturbing to me, and not just because it clocks in at about $3 per pill. I hate the idea of having him on meds at such an early age. But I hate the idea of more late-night ER visits more. Here's to him outgrowing it as I did.