I’ve been MIA for a bit, and I know there are things I ought to journal — the wedding, the wedding gig, my first Mother’s Day — but things have been a wee bit busy the past couple of days. Liam’s cold was fine up until yesterday when suddenly his breathing began to be laboured and raspy, and he developed an odd barking cough. Late yesterday afternoon I called our GP but she’s away for a week, so we took him out and tried to find a clinic that was (a) open and (b) would take kids. On our fifth try, we got an appointment at a pediatric clinic for later in the evening. The clinic doctor’s opinion was that he probably had asthma, although it could be bronchitis or pneumonia, and prescribed a liquid Ventolin. If it didn’t improve, he said, take him to the emergency unit at the hospital.

Well, neither HRH nor I slept last night, and Liam didn’t get much shut-eye either, because despite the medication it sounded like every breath was going to be Liam’s last. This morning we packed him up and took him to the hospital. Triage went off without a hitch; it seems that babies with breathing problems jump the queue considerably. (Or maybe it had something to do with Liam trying to lean over in order to kiss the triage nurse.) The hospital doctor’s evaluation was similar and yet different: yep, Liam has asthma, and he explained the whole threshold/resistance to lung irritation thing to us rather well. Something on top of the cold pushed him past his asthma threshold — the trees flowering, the pet store yesterday, a bit of milk going down the wrong tube, whatever — and his little lungs said that enough was enough and seized up in self-defense. He prescribed a course of Ventolin and Flovent in actual inhalers (he was rather scornful of the clinic doctor because apparently no one gives kids liquid Ventolin any more, and it’s much less effective), plus a corticosteroid to deal with the pressure the last of the cold was putting on the pulmonary system. Liam has a funky face-mask thing with a hole in the end for the inhaler, and he’s taken to it like a champ. (It has bears on it. Very cute.)

It was unreal. Thirty seconds after the first shot of Ventolin, his breathing was already easier. After the Flovent, it was like last night never happened. I took him into his room and nursed him for less than five minutes before he was out cold while breathing normally.

So Liam’s latest adventure is over, and now maybe we can all get back to what qualifies as normal around here. Sometime over the next couple of days I’ll get down to journaling about the weekend, especially the wedding, because I need to put it down in words for myself.