Driving home at 9:30 p.m. from an urgent appointment, I pull into my driveway, eager to see my three children tucked into bed after their first day at school.
But the house is totally dark and there is no one inside. Something is clearly wrong.
A message on the answering machine from my husband tells me he has taken our son Eric, 6, to the hospital because Eric’s breathing registers at a dangerous level on a monitoring device we’ve been using off and on for the last year.
His personal best is 180 on the peak flow meter, a simple but highly effective plastic tool that measures the flow of air out of his lungs.
Tonight, Eric can’t get the meter reading to rise above 25, a life-threatening level.
Eric had a cough for two days. Otherwise, he seemed fine and was eager to start 1st grade at his new school. But he came home from school wiped out, our baby-sitter told us later.
Once before, when his breathing reached a similar low, Eric was hospitalized for what we were told was pneumonia. This night, we are luckier. Even though Eric is diagnosed with pneumonia and infections in each ear, a single breathing treatment renders him healthy enough to come home, as long as we promise to see our pediatrician the next day.
“How do you feel?” the hospital doctor asked Eric after the breathing treatment.
“Like a new man,” Eric said.
Our pediatrician, Dr. Carol Sanders, explains that Eric most likely has a seasonal or episodic type of asthma, not pneumonia. Asthma–a chronic disease of the lungs often triggered by allergies, colds and respiratory infections–narrows or plugs the passageways in the lungs with mucus, which mimics the appearance of pneumonia on an X-ray, Sanders says. The pictures of lungs filled with mucus remind me of arteries clogged with cholesterol. In this case, air, not blood, can’t flow freely.
Worldwide, asthma rates are rising, particularly among urban and African-American children, and major campaigns are under way to address the problem.
In the last year, we’ve monitored and treated Eric with the peak flow meter, which tells us if his breathing is at a normal, borderline or dangerous level, but we had no clear diagnosis or year-round plan. Now, we do.
And we know the culprit, after a dozen doctor visits, five trips to the emergency department and the hospitalization last December for pneumonia. It was then that Eric earned the name Lung Man from a friendly respiratory therapist who understood Eric’s love of superheroes and praised his efforts when puffing into the peak flow meter.
Like many asthmatics, Eric is most vulnerable in the autumn because of ragweed allergies. More than half of adults with asthma have allergic rhinitis, or pollen allergy, the most common of all allergies, according to the best general book I’ve found from the American Lung Association. It’s called “Family Guide to Asthma and Allergies: How You and Your Children Can Breathe Easier.”
Eric also is vulnerable to an asthma attack when he has a cold or respiratory infection and possibly during exercise. In Eric’s case, a simple cough is our best clue that he might be having a problem, although indicators of an attack vary among children.
I’m grateful to have a diagnosis. I’m thankful my son’s disease is drawing attention from the medical community. I truly appreciate the hours of care the medical staff at the Henry Ford Health System’s Pierson Clinic in Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., has given us, as well as the countless other families filling the rooms at the clinic. All too often, it’s asthma, asthma, asthma.
But in the weeks that follow, as I learn all I can about this disease, I am amazed by the changing advice, even regarding the medicines Eric uses. I find bewildering, at least initially, the array of medicines and monitoring instructions that come with an asthma diagnosis.
“Every time you go to the doctor’s office, you’re told something different,” I tell another mother of an asthmatic child who succumbs to it each fall.
I also find myself saying to doctors and nurses: “No one ever told me that before.” This applies to the need to shake asthma medications aggressively before using them, lest Eric not get enough medicine to be helpful; knowing how to determine how much medicine remains in an asthma inhaler by floating it in water; and even important information such as that it’s necessary to wash out your mouth after inhaling a steroid medicine to prevent yeast infections.
The amount of material I’m given to read far exceeds anything I’ve been given for other family health problems.
I’d glad to have the information but wonder how many parents, particularly single parents or busy families, find asthma so overwhelming or time-consuming they don’t do what they should.
The best sheet of information I’ve received correlates Eric’s normal, borderline and danger zones into precise ranges on a peak flow meter, with the appropriate drug and medical instructions pertinent to each reading.
I sign up for an asthma education class. Registered nurse Carol Fischer, who teaches the class at the Pierson Clinic, consumes a full hour talking about asthma.
Most of the class is aimed at me. But clearly, though Eric looks uninterested, spending much of the hour quietly drawing a robot with crayons and paper, he is paying attention. The few times he is asked a question, he has a ready answer.
The most alarming thing about the appointment is that Fischer tells me that a medicine Eric has been taking is not one he’s supposed to be using.
We leave the appointment with helpful paperback asthma books, new prescriptions, a free breathing monitor, a diary to record daily breathing levels and a nifty new toolbox Fischer gives Eric for his medicines.
Eric asks if he can put his name on the box. Then he asks, “How do you spell son?”
When I tell him, he signs the box, “Son, Eric.”
