First, Mark finally had a follow-up with his doctor with the results of his sleep study from this summer, and it turns out he has.... narcolepsy. (I was going to add a drumroll, but I put that in the title, so you already knew, didn't you? You did.) Yes, legit effing narcolepsy. WHAT EVEN, Y'ALL.
We were expecting a diagnosis of sleep apnea (he has many of the symptoms, not the least of which is snoring that might break our marriage, or at least our marriage bed) but... narcolepsy? Although, once we got some info about what it really is (not what Hollywood thinks it is), it totally makes sense. Like, we both were like OH AHA WELL DUH. Things we had just sort of gotten used to as quirks or "whatever" patterns in our life and house, that we hadn't realized were as bizarre as they really are -- suddenly make sense. Honestly we both felt dumb for not wondering about narcolepsy sooner.
ANYWAY so it's super treatable and he can take a daily med and even just one week in, it's amazing and I love it and I know for him it will be an adjustment of course, but for me, this sh!t is awesome and I am so glad to suddenly have a chatty energetic husband in the evenings after work, and we don't have to store our catching up until his days off, and I don't have to keep him awake through the evening so he doesn't ruin his night of sleep, and and and and and. Our lives are about to get better, I think.
(Snoring is unrelated. His doctor has ideas on that too. But not solved yet. I invested in fancy earplugs.) (By fancy I mean normal earplugs that are neon green.)
(And no, the irony of Mark's narcolepsy being married to my horrible sleep-broken failure insomnia is not lost on us.)
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Second, we finally took Charlotte into the pediatric pulmonologist for whom we've had a referral for many many many months, but because of schedule logistics (side eye to Mark's job) haven't been able to make happen. And she has asthma.
This is not a surprise. An urgent care doctor mentioned it when she was a toddler, after she had had several pneumonias and every cold that hit our family seemed to be thrice as bad for her as for anyone else, and go straight to her chest. She's had many courses of breathing treatments and albuterol over the years, and it's one of those things that we worried about, but not acutely, because it was only bad when she was sick.
But then in the last year when she started gasping when she cried hard (more than other babies gasp when they cry) and wheezing was one of the first signs of her getting a cold, we decided to finally take her to a specialist per the earlier suggestions.
Anyway, we took her, they measured her breathing, she has a very average normal asthma. It's all okay. I mean, I don't love that she has to deal with it, but she (probably*) won't need daily preventive treatments (*we are tracking inhaler usage on an as-needed basis, and if after three months, certain patterns emerge, she may after all -- but for now they think likely not) and they said she can be as active as she wants to be. The albuterol is effective for her and she is a champ at the mask and inhaler, so it's all okay.
Maybe cold season will be easier for her this year, armed with these additional tools.
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She also wrote her name for the first time this week. I should say, "write" is a very loose interpretation of what she did -- which was really mostly just drawing. She copied the letters from the name tag on her table in her preschool class. She knows none of those letters except C. So maybe I should just consider this really good art, not actual writing.
But either way I am keeping it forever, because obviously.
1 comment:
Once we started seeing a pediatric pulmonologist, Annabel's asthma got soooo much better because we knew how to treat it correctly. I mean, she still has her bouts of wheezing but none that have sent her to the ER in...years. Wow, years. It's hard to believe when it's the ever present Lurker, waiting to attack. Anyway, that was the least encouraging way to encourage someone, but that's what I was trying to do. :)
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