Asthma

I saw a friend over the weekend and we were talking about how well written Julia's blog Here Be Hippogriffs is. I particularly like how she can come up with a turn of a phrase which is unique but right on what she is trying to explain. "Yes," my friend pointed out, "she spends a lot of time on her writing and working on her craft."

Alas, I do not have that time.

I would love to spend hours on each blog post.  Or, actually, I would love to live a life in which I had a couple of extra hours a day to spend crafting an informative and witty blog post that would thrill and inform my readers.  As someone who has recently started running at 5:30 am (again) I am fully aware that we choose to spend time on what we want to do.  And it's obvious, I don't spend time on cleaning my house and probably spend too much time on facebook.

Nonetheless, I don't have enough time to write as much and as well as I'd like here.

What I NEED, however, from this blog, is a space to work through pressing issues in my brain so I can process them, get them out, and move on.  Indeed, I want to work through my evolving feelings about my body, now that I'm done with childbearing, but have an extra 15 to 25 lbs on me.  (The difference depends on how ambitious or pitiful I'm feeling in my goals at any one time)  I want to work through the fact that our house IS A MESS, and I cannot figure out how to keep the mudroom clean (ironically!) much less the rest of the house.  The mudroom is the goal because it's the smallest room in the house.  I can't even keep the extra shoes picked up off the floor in there.  There's lots evolving in our lives and that has been what I've been cogitating on for this blog post.

And then, Christopher went ahead and finally got his diagnosis of asthma, and I'm sort of cogitating on that.  We've known it's been coming.  As I pointed out to Dave, when Christopher got his first respiratory illness around 7 months old or so and was suffering from massive eczema, asthma started coming up.  (But the doctor said he was too young to have allergies, blahda blahda blah, yeah I was right).  Then last winter's horrible RSV hospitalization, all the docs and nurses kept saying, "You're on the path to asthma."  And I'm pretty sure there were a couple of other pneumonias and ear infections in there in which folks kept saying "Asthma, meet Christopher.  Christopher, meet Asthma."

And thank goodness for friends and colleagues as well as relatives who have been with us down this path and have let us know what to expect.

I'm actually not really feeling anything right now.  I don't know if I'm supposed to be upset or neutral.  I'm glad we FINALLY got a sheet from the doctor about what to do with asthma (green light, yellow light, red light) and have a referral to a pulmonologist.  (Really?  Blogger spell check wants to change pullmonologist to Kremlinologist? Really?) I'm also reassured that the doctor said I was intuitively doing the right thing before I even got my green/yellow/red state check list.  (We were in a Yellow State)

I think we finally got the diagnosis today because there is no other underlying reason for Christopher's wheezing.  He doesn't have a virus-that-has-progressed-into-lung-funk, pneumonia or RSV.  The wheezing seems to be pretty independent of anything else.

And people, here is one thing you really need to know about lung sounds and when to worry:

If you hear gurgling/funky sounds when a child breathes,

1) If it's when s/he begins to exhale, it's probably snot and there's nothing you can do.
2) If it's at the END of the exhale, it is wheezing and you need to do something.

The first gurgling sound is the louder one and sounds awful.  But it's the last one, sometimes quite soft, that's the bad one.

Anyhoo.  He's sleeping now and I had a few free minutes.  I can think about this and think about this.  Or I can get it out and move on to doing what I really need to do.