We made it 3 years and 9 months, more or less, until tonight, without having to make this trip.

Tonight, we had to take Thalia to the emergency room in order to get her some help for a little trouble breathing she was having. Basically, they treated her for asthma. It won’t be clear for a while yet whether she actually has asthma or just had a bout of responsive airway disease (I think that’s what the doctor called it), but she got albuterol and some Orapred (oral prednizone).

It all started when I picked them up from school and the teacher noted Thalia was fussy and wheezy. She sure was! Dinner was pretty rough, and in the tub I noticed that she had that tell-tale skin contraction around her ribs when she was breathing. That prompted an immediate call to the pediatrician’s office, which was followed by their mandate to hustle to the hospital.

I went with Siena and Thalia around 8 PM. Fortunately, they provided little bags of toys for Siena to play with. (Technically one bag was for Thalia, but she was having nothing to do with toys, so Siena got double the toys.) Thalia, mostly exhausted and wheezing, was an unhappy camper, especially through the mist phase of the albuterol they gave her right then. But then it kicked in and she got spastic for a while, and quite cheery, and then she got fussy again.

Mama joined us after work, around 9:20, and we finally got home around 10:30 or so. The girls went straight to bed, which I didn’t expect in Thalia’s case given how much she was coughing on the way home.

And now we are the not-so-proud owners of a nebulizer machine and a couple of prescriptions that we need to fill in the morning. Alas.

That being said, this appears to have a minor emergency, and Thalia should be OK within a day or so.