As you may know Bailey has asthma and it’s a very tricky problem to have. I remember once when Bailey was very very young (6 months?) she was very sick and I watched her lay there on the bed struggling to breathe. At the time we didn’t know any better but she was in a very dangerous position that night. She had pneumonia and it was seriously affecting her breathing, she was not well. We just watched, timid to jump the gun and be the parents that overreact to every little fever or runny nose.
We moved to Chicago in September 2008 and not long after Bailey was sick with what we thought was a cold. She was eating and began choking on applesauce (if I remember correctly). She could not breathe — Andrea took her right to the ER and called me. They checked her into the hospital for 4 days, we could see the concern in the doctors and nurses eyes when they talked with us about her condition. They were worried and so were we.
We made it through the rough early years fighting this with adult strength asthma medications, albuterol inhalers and lots of steroids. Just recently everyone was convinced that we had turned a corner and we began discussing reducing dosages with Bailey’s doctors. Then it happened again. One afternoon she was jumping on a trampoline and started coughing. We thought nothing of it at 1st and the next thing we knew she was face down on the trampoline struggling to get her breath. Andrea grabbed her up and ran to the house to give her some albuterol inhaler and I set up her nebulizer. Two puffs of the inhaler and two breathing treatments later she was ok again.
Looks like we aren’t out of the water yet on this one. We will keep hoping and praying that her lungs can grow out of this disease. I cry every time I remember looking at her tiny chest heaving up and down trying to get a breath, seeing her behind the bars of a hospital crib or face down on a trampoline coughing, struggling for air. It’s hard to write this now but I don’t want to gloss over her story and dismiss this large part of her and our life.
