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My oldest daughter Kennedy recently had a horrible cough.
So I gave her Zyrtec and Tylenol Cold for about a week – that’s what the doctor would have told me to do, right? When she wasn’t better after a week, I broke down and took her in. I was shocked at what the doc had to say.
“Wheezing and rattling…blah, blah, blah…pneumonia!”
Of course all the “bad mother” thoughts filled my brain as we walked down the hall to get a chest x-ray. Thank goodness Kennedy did NOT have pneumonia, but she did have to get a breathing treatment. And for the first time in my nearly 6 years of being a Mom, I was sent home with a nebulizer.
The conversation I had with the nurse was probably quite comical:
Nurse: “Take this home with you. Put the medicine in here. Put the mask on her face. Turn it on with this button. When the smoke stops, you are done. Administer treatments every 4 hours or as needed.”
Me: “Wait a minute, I have to take this home?”
Nurse: “Yes.”
Me: “Do I need to bring it back?”
Nurse: “No – it’s yours to keep.”
Me (in my head): “I bet this will cost me an arm and a leg.”
Me (out loud): “Don’t you need to be a nurse or have some medical training to use this thing?”
Nurse: “It’s easy, you’ll do fine.”
Me: “Where do I put the medicine again?”
Anyway, I took home the nebulizer, and it really wasn’t hard to use. But since when do doctors send you home with nebulizers? My brother had asthma as a kid and we NEVER had anything other than cough syrup and an inhaler in the house. So imagine my surprise when I went to work, mentioned it to a few other Moms, and they all had nebulizer experience—in some cases, a personal nebulizer for each kid. Most have had them for years, so apparently I was late to join “The Nebulizer Club.”
So is the nebulizer the new go-to in pediatric medicine? When I grew up, it was all about antibiotics. It didn’t matter what your problem was when you walked in, you left the doctor with a prescription for something-cillin. It makes you wonder what is going on with our environment that causes us to have to pump steroids into our children’s lungs on a regular basis. I am not a global warning fanatic, but I’m just saying…
Well, thank goodness my insurance covered the cost of my nebulizer and the meds (thanks Capital One), and I wasn’t surprised to learn, just a few weeks later, that my 16 month old also would need breathing treatments.
This time, I was a seasoned pro.
Nurse: “This is a neb-”
Me: “Yep, I have one already. I just need the meds and a new mask.”
What about you? Are you a member of “The Nebulizer Club?”
