Just Breathe

Your kid can't breathe. Thankfully these moments do not happen to a parent often because when they do I think we age 10 years. When we began chemo the doctors explained that one of Emma's drugs can develop an allergy in about half of the children. She went months with no reaction so sadly our guard was down. It started with red circles around her eyes. Then she started coughing...but she always coughs during chemo because she gets some nausea but the tummy meds prevent her tossing her cookies. So she coughs. But this cough sounded off. Then in seconds her entire body burst out this terrible red patchy rash and she began to itch. She was having trouble breathing. Everything went in slow motion. The nurse rushing in, the doctor checking vitals the other nurse pushing meds in her mediport and me holding her hand. The medication worked fast, in a minute she was breathing normally and in about ten minutes her rash stopped itching. It took about an hour for the redness to go away.

Emma's main doctor who does her "road map" (a plan of medications with a timeline and dosage) is out of the country for another two weeks. He is only reachable by email. The doctor we saw yesterday told me that in these cases they typically pretreat, meaning, they continue to give her the chemo but give her the meds for an allergic reaction first...does this sound crazy to anyone else? I know I did not go to medical school but giving a child a medication that we KNOW causes a severe

Once she was stable, it was much worse!

allergic reaction just seems like playing with fire. I told the entire team that under no circumstances whatsoever are they to ever, ever, ever give her that medication ever again. Ever. We decided to give her a break from chemo next week and just do lab work to make sure she is healthy enough for Hawaii then when we get back we will have a team meeting about where to go from here.

For today and perhaps the next day or two we will be watching her for another allergic reaction because she got about 1/3 of her chemo before we stopped. It is still in her system. They sent me home with medication in case she gets a flair up. Needless to say I will not be doing much relaxing or sleeping until I know she is safe for good.

Long day. Just breathe.