Sucks to your as-mar

Maybe you haven't read Lord of the Flies- but I was forced to read it in high school and the line "Sucks to your asmar" has been passing through my mind often lately. As in SUCKS to Theo's asthma. The kid is currently on 5 drugs. 5. Ok, one of them is for pink eye, but the other four are attempting to join forces and beat his lungs into shape so that he can get more oxygen in and less coughing out, and therefore I can get more sleep. Which is the bottom line. Or maybe the bottom line is that Jon and I kind of suck at being the parent of a kid who has pulmonary issues.

Earlier this spring, after about 4 years of trying to treat Theo's asthma with a nebulizer, we watched old brother Pete swirl up a batch of drugs for his son, Max, who has a propensity for croup and ends up with the little fishy mask on with some regularity. We watched the familiar motions of opening the vials and pouring them in the contraption, and then Pete put this little stopper thingy on the end. Stopper thingy? We never use that....but we looked through our neb case and sure enough, we had one of those. So the next time we had to fire up machine for Theo we put on the stopper thingy, and boy oh boy did that elongate the nebulization process. Hmmm.

And then this week, Theo would seem great during the day but go to bed and the wheezing, the coughing, would set in with a vengeance. So Jon and I did a little thinking.....what could it be about his bedtime routine that could trigger this? Could it be the moldy book (soaked it in the river last weekend...oops...big library fine) that we should probably toss but are at the climax so can't stop reading to him? Or perhaps it was a mistake to wash all of his bedding last week and hang them on the deck to dry on a day that was great for line drying due to the 30 mph winds. Could those winds have been carrying all the pollen in the tri-county area? Seems so. Tonight we paid up our fines to the library and got ourselves a second, fresh, copy of the book- the moldy one is now ours to keep, but me thinks we should give it the old heave ho- and we washed all the bedding and dried it in the drier. And we used the stopper thingy on the neb. We're hoping that we are turning over a new leaf here and that the boy will rebound. Sometimes I wonder how I ever passed that parenting license test that they give you.