Well, I did something really bad, and I'm feeling really guilty too: I gave my little daughter my bad genes. I was up all night last night rocking my 4 YO and giving her breathing treatments.
Now, I know I've been a critic of frivolous breathing treatments, but I will contend that my baby needed them. Yes it is true she had the classic signs of a cold, and Albuterol will not cure a cold, but she also had retractions and wheezes that went away with the treatments.
My daughter is lucky to have me as a dad, and I suppose I'm lucky to be a respiratory therapy dad, because otherwise I probably would have had to take her to the hospital last night. She was miserable, coughing, tossing and turning, and she insisted on sleeping in our bed. Needless to say, none of us were getting any sleep.
Finally around midnight I gave in and decided to just give her a treatment.
"I'm not doing it," she said. "I am not taking a treatment."
I put the neb in front of her and, without even opening her eyes, she clipped it between her teeth and took the whole thing that way. That, I will tell you from experience, is how you know a kid needs a treatment. If a kid takes the treatment without a fight, they need it.
Many times at work I've had kids fight me tooth and nail until, all of a sudden, they realize my treatment is making them feel better. Voila, they are instantly ideal patients. My daughter is a quintessential ideal patient for Albuterol -- unfortunately.
Like I said, I am not happy about this. But after the treatment her retractions and wheezes disappeared, and she slept for a few hours. And it's not like she just needed one treatment, she needed one every three hours.
Obviously, daddy didn't get much sleep last night.
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Okay, so my wife took KK to the doctor this morning, and her SpO2 was 88% with a matching HR of 140. After the treatment via air compressor her SpO2 increased to 97%.
"She's borderline," the doctor said.
"Borderline what?" my wife said.
"Borderline bad."
The doc. agreed that KK should continue getting the treatments, and she added BID Pulmicort. Perhaps, considering she gets this way in the cold damp weather when she has a cold, she should stay on Pulmicort.
I'm feeling guilty.
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