Deanna Slater

And it’s driving me nuts!

So here I am, at 3:30 in the morning, writing about it.

Though it has nothing to do with why I’m still up at 3:30am.  I’m not sure why I’m still up.  Maybe because I like to be up late at night, when everyone else is sleeping.  This is MY time and I like it. :)

Anyways, back to what I am really here to write about.

I’m thinking back, trying to remember when it all started and I honestly can’t.  I probably should’ve written it down.  Maybe I even wrote it in a blog, but I’m too lazy to search. I’m guessing it’s been almost a year now, if not a year.

No, wait, oh my god, it HAS been a year.  Jeezus, poor kid.  Ok, so, a year ago….  Well, technically I guess we could go back 7 years ago in April Ashley was having trouble breathing.  She was sick, and we thought it was just a cold but she wasn’t getting any better and we could see that she was having real difficulty breathing, so we took her to the hospital.  We thought she’d be given some antibiotics and sent on her way.  Long story short, she spent 3 days in the hospital.  She wasn’t terribly sick or anything, really.  They had no idea what was wrong with her exactly, but treated her for “Asthma-like symptoms” and kept her on oxygen.  Once her oxygen levels were back up to normal she was sent home.

Many years passed…well, 6 years, I guess, and although she sometimes had trouble breathing, it was never like it was that time and it was always when she had a cold, which was to be expected.  Then last year, now that I think about it more it must’ve been early December, she was sick.  Had trouble breathing. Then she got whooping cough also known as Pertussis.  Boy was that a trip! lol  I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was pretty scary.  She would cough and make a crazy whooping sound (hence the name) and then hack up some horrible looking white pasty looking stuff.  It was pretty awful to watch.  I can’t remember now why or how we got the idea but I ended up Googling it and pretty much knew she had whooping cough but took her to a doctor anyway.  It was confirmed, she was given antibiotics and eventually got better.  But a regular cough remained.  We had her referred to an asthma specialist.  She was put on 2 different inhalers, one being a steroid.  She was on that steroid for months and months!  One side effect is weight gain, and she did gain some weight and wasn’t happy about it.  It’s not easy being an 11 year old these days.

So, after many months of these inhalers and many trips to the asthma specialist, nothing changed.  We finally decided to take her off the steroid inhaler, against the specialist’s judgement.  This was in June.  Well, wouldn’t you know it, she got better!  For the summer months she was better anyways.  And she’s lost weight since then and is now so happy with the way she looks.  Well, besides the usual things like not liking her teeth, or her cheeks when she smiles, or her chin or… well, the list goes on.  But at least she’s thinner and feeling good about that.

The summer came and went and then, around the beginning of September, she got another cold and the cough came back.  The poor kid has been coughing and coughing all day and all through the night ever since.  She was still taking the one inhaler once in a while to try to get some relief, and she says it worked.

We were just recently thinking maybe there is something in this house that is causing this… Oh yeah, we also had an allergy test done.  She’s allergic to the usual things, cats, dogs, mold… So we got to thinking, maybe we’ve got mold in this house somewhere that we’re not aware of and it’s hurting our poor girl.  We decided that once we were done with this Christmas business we’d set to work cleaning out the downstairs and giving the house a real good once over and see if we could find and eliminate the problem.

This got me thinking, and so I Googled chronic coughing and did some reading up about it.  There are many factors, one of which being mold allergies.  I read something about Benedryl being the allergy medication of choice for such things.  I just happen to have some left over from my summer with hives (I took those things like candy!) and decided that I would give her one and see if that helped.  I gave her one Christmas Eve about 10pm.  She was passed out on the couch by 11pm. lol  I remember those things made me pretty drowsy at first.

Just after 11 that night I got her up and to her bed, where she fell back to sleep, while watching tv, about half an hour later… and slept for hours cough-free!!  She woke up at 4am coughing and says she couldn’t get back to sleep.  She was in our bedroom at 6am, and we all got up for Christmas morning activities at 7am.

But she didn’t cough much all that day.  Nothing out of the ordinary.

We went to Jimmy and Ellen’s for dinner.  They have 2 dogs, a cat and a degu.  All things that should have and would normally have set Ashley off.  I don’t recall her coughing once the whole time we were there, and we were there a good 6 hours!

We came home, she went to bed and slept all through the night without coughing.

She did that again the next night.  And last night.  And right now she’s in bed, she’s been there almost 2 hours, and I haven’t heard a peep.

I am very VERY happy my baby girl is no longer coughing her face off every night… but I’m also very puzzled by all of this.

She still breathes a little heavier than she should.  Sometimes you can really hear her and we have to remind her that she’s doing it and she stops, I think she just gets lazy or something. lol  My brother used to sound just like that, I remember, and he has asthma.  So, she isn’t completely cured as far as breathing goes, and we have no idea exactly why she breathes the way she does.  She did have an asthma test done but I think she was kind of nervous about it and screwed it up.  But the good news is, for now, she’s getting a good night’s sleep with no coughing.

I’d just really like to know why or how this has happened, so we can keep doing whatever it is so we can keep her this way.