Last night...Ooooh! Strokes song!
Last niiiight, she saiiiid
Oh baby I feel so downnn....
Ahem.
Sorry.
(Paul Harvey Voice) And now it's time for: the rest of the story.
Last night I was playing a bed game with my son, the Monkey (aka Jonathan). A bed game is a rough housing game that has to be played on Mommy and Daddy's queen size bed. (See! See?! I run the house! I am the queen! There is no king size bed, thus there is no king! There is only me, the queen of all I see! Mwahahahaha!!!)
And now back to regularly scheduled blogcasting.
The Monkey and I are playing the newly invented game, Kiss Your Nose. In Kiss Your Nose someone kisses the other person's nose while that other person tries very hard to prevent them from doing so. I try to keep things as even as possible in these games. For example, the Monkey can't restrain my arms, so I don't restrain his.
Oh yeah! When one of us manages to kiss the other we stand (me on my knees, him on his feet) and stage yell, "I'm the Champion! I'm the Champion!" Until the freshly kissed/defeated person gets up and tackles the triumphant.
I had just successfully kissed the Monkey on his nose and was about to start my victory cheer when I felt a spasm in my throat. I have asthma and usually I get a nice long warning that something is up. I'll smell a chemical or pollen or some other trigger. Most of the time, I'll feel a subtle tightness that gradually increases. Very rarely does an attack sideline me out of nowhere.
This one did. I made a funny noise then started this weird gagging type thing I do where I'm trying to get air out but some of the various tubes in my throat have suddenly swelled up. The thing is, most of them don't close but my body reacts like it has to get air out of ALL of them NOW. So, it tries to do this coughing, forcing thing. I usually have this overwhelming need to clear my throat and have to override it because I know that there is nothing in my throat and the act of trying to clear it exacerbates the problem.
The same thing goes for coughing; coughing does nothing but further irritate everything and makes the swelling everywhere worse. It is to be avoided and slow, deep breaths trying to sort of breathe around the swollen shut tubes are the way to go.
The Monkey reacted immediately. He looked at me and said, "Mommy, you coughing?" I nodded (even though I wasn't actually coughing at that time, coughing is what the Monkey calls an asthma attack). My three year old son jumped down from the bed, ran to the bedside table, opened the drawer and grabbed my inhaler. He brought it to me yelling, "Here your medicine, Mommy. Take your medicine."
By the time I took the medicine the shallow breaths had gone from wheezing to those weird barking noises that are the step right before unavoidable coughing. But the medicine did its job and stopped the attack. As I lay back sideways on the top of the bed trying to breath in the medicine, the Monkey sat next to me with this studious expression and a hand on my chest.
I felt guilty. It might be stupid to feel that way since I have little to no control over my asthma but I did feel guilty. We had been having a good time, playing a game and I ruined it. Another thing that both made me proud and bothered me was how ably the Monkey had handled it.
I was proud because he had stayed calm and known exactly what to do which is amazing in a toddler. I was bothered because he's a toddler, dang it! I don't think he should have to deal with his Mom having fits.
Now, Mom, if you're reading this don't take that the wrong way. My Mom is epileptic and had seizures when I was a kid. There was one time, she had been standing in the front doorway when she had a seizure and she hit her head on the door frame.
The blow opened up a deep gash over one of her eyes. When I responded to my older sister's screams and arrived in the living room my Mom had just stopped twitching and I watched her go still. Her eyes were open and blood had pooled in one socket. She was still, a bluish pale color, her face covered in blood, completely unresponsive and staring at the ceiling. I honestly thought she was dead.
My sister told me to stay with her while she ran to the neighbor's trailer because we didn't have a phone to call for help. After an eternity she came back alone. No one had answered the door. The next trailer was down the street at least a block away, if not more. (We lived in the countryside so there weren't any acutual blocks but I'm trying to create a referenceable unit of distance.) I ran all the way and when I got there was completely out of breath. I finally managed to get across that my Mom was hurt and our neighbor took me back to my house.
When we got there our otherer neighbor was already there. He'd heard my sister knocking and yelling but hadn't been dressed. When he'd grabbed some clothes, he came over.
That was a really awful day for me. The next day my Mom dropped me off at kindergarten and was talking to my teacher. Mom looked terrible with a big black eye and stitches etc. So, of course, she had to explain to my teacher what happened. My teacher turned to me and joked, "Did you do that to your Mama?"
I was young enough to not get the joke. I thought she seriously believed me capable of hurting my Mom in such a terrible way. I burst into tears and said, "No! I love my Mama. I don't want her to die!" It took a long time for them to calm me down.
I guess I'm remembering that and I don't want it to be that way for the Monkey. I don't want him to worry about me the way I worried about my Mom. I don't want him to watch me driven off in an ambulance the way I saw her go too many times. However, writing this has made me see something. I don't blame my Mom for being sick. Why am I blaming myself?
I guess it's not going to be the best thing in the world for the Monkey but it's not going to horribly scar him either. I lived through it. He will too.
So, I guess this was a bit of blog therapy. Who knew?
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