Last Thursday I took Maria to the pediatrician because her breathing just wasn’t sounding good. She said Maria sounded “tighter” than she’d ever heard her, gave her 5 days of steroids, and suggested we go to a pulmonologist. Amazingly, we got in to the pulmonologist today and she said Maria has asthma. A nurse came in with a book on asthma, several prescriptions, an inhaler, and instructions on her new medications. It’s so complicated that she had to go through it about 5 times for me.
We have to put a mask with a spacer (looks like a plastic bottle) tightly on her face, squirt the inhaler and wait until she takes in 6 good breaths. That’s twice a day. Then I’m supposed to clean out her nose and squirt some nose spray in each nostril. That’s just once a day. And if she’s doing worse than normal, then in addition to those (and her other medications and therapies, etc), we’re supposed to either do a 15-minute breathing treatment or use another type of inhaler medicine, mask tight on face, squirt, 6 breaths, wait 1 minute, then do it again 1-3 more times. That’s every 3-4 hours for 24 hours and if she’s still having trouble breathing we either call the hospital or take her to the emergency room, or I guess call 911 if it’s really bad. That was all so complicated that I forgot if I gave Maria her seizure medicine this evening. I know it’s going to be routine soon, but holy crap, will it ever end. When I told Manolis, he started splashing cold water on his face because he was having hot flashes.
Saturday I bought a set of tires because mine were about ready to completely wear out, to the tune of $550. Today Manolis had a flat and they couldn’t fix it and bottom line is he got a new set of tires too. $500. I’m still paying our car repair bills –for some reason my car, Manolis’ old car, and his new car all had large repair bills within a very short time of each other. (although to be fair, our angel, George, did pay for my car’s repairs). Happy New Year.
But, there was a miracle on the Hudson, the Arizona Cardinals are going to the Super Bowl, and Barack Obama will soon be our president, so there is still hope and miracles and wonderful things, it’s just hard to remember them sometimes.