ELISA ENGLISH's Blog 英語園地

I still consider that my son a healthy boy even though he was a frequent visitor to the Children’s Hospital.  Every visit was for a different reason.  Once he was bitten by the mosquito and scratched his skin so hard that the bite became inflamed.  A visit to the Urgent Care indicated that the bite was severe and the suggestion was to take him to the emergency room immediately for treatment to avoid any damage to the issues.  The most frightening visit was when his asthma attacked.  We found out he has asthma in a hard way.  He was hospitalized for a day with medication administered every 2 hours to keep him alive.  After 24 hours of rescue, he could finally breathe easily.  He was barely six years old at that time.  He is on asthma medication ever since.  We have heard that many kids have outgrown their asthma.  We do hope that he will too.  This is one reason that I push him to take swimming lessons.  He does love to swim though. 

Not long after his asthma attack, he developed a severe allergic reaction to tree nuts.  I have never thought that I would have to read all the ingredient labels on any snack box.  Tree nuts are very common ingredients in pastry products.  In addition, many chocolate or candy may be produced in equipments processing tree nuts.  Luckily, we learnt of his situation before he started Kindergarten to provide the school nurse with necessary medication and instruction.  It was ironic that he actually got an allergic reaction the 2^nd day after the school started.  He was on the school lunch program and ate a cookie which might have contained traces of tree nuts. 

All these allergies make traveling somewhat difficult.  Can you imagine that my son has travelled by air 25 times so far?  Every time we take a flight, we have to lug along a huge bag filled with drugs and medical equipment.  I wanted to share a funny story with you.  If you have travelled from the US to Taipei via Northwest Airline, you would know that the flight stops over at a Japanese Airport.  Everyone from the flight has to get off the airplane and goes through the security screen again, even though nobody steps outside the airport to smuggle anything in.  Anyway, the Japanese airport security officers had hard time understanding what all these drugs were despite that we had provided our doctor’s emergency health plans.  They had to make a phone call and spent a long time verifying all the drugs we brought.  I guess that there aren’t many passengers with Asthma and tree-nut allergy, and that not one security officer has seen an asthma nebulizer before.  Now that he is big enough to use the inhaler, our medication bag has shrunk significantly.

This article sounds like airing my kids’ dirty laundry.  Should I continue?  Why not?  They can probably learn from this article the amount of troubles they have brought to their parents.

Both our kids have eczema.  What exactly is eczema?  It is a chronic skin disorder that involves scaly and itchy rashes.  The skin gets so dry that it is extremely itchy.  Growing up in Minnesota makes it worse because the humidity in the air is extremely low.  Actually, my son was once admitted to the hospital because of the scratches (a different incident from the mosquito bite).  The skin under his armpit was severely inflamed and the tissue was damaged.  We were told to use wet wrap therapy.  We had to apply topical steroid medicine and wrap up his entire upper body with soaked dressings underneath his pajama before he went to sleep.  This was done every day for a week until his skin returned back to health.  My son was extremely comfortable during this wet wrap therapy.  I am glad that my daughter does not have to go through it.

Still, I think that we are lucky to have two gorgeous and somewhat healthy kids.  By the way, my daughter might have seasonal allergy.  She is too young to take the screen test.

If you have read my previous article about Mongolian spots, you would know that my husband likes to joke that the bad gene from my side of the family was passed onto our kids.  For all these allergies, I blame my husband for his gene though he still tries to make a case that my mom is allergic to mangoes.  My husband has hay fever and cannot eat any fruit related to the apple family such as pear, cherry, peach, plum, etc.