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Raising Nate part 5 - Diagnostic [1]

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Date: 2025-04-26

In hindsight we should have known something was wrong, but neither I nor the Pediatrician understood until Nate was around 4-5 that he had what’s called bronchial asthma or coughing Asthma. My family didn’t have a history of asthma, though I as you know have a very allergic terrain.

Even as a baby Nate would get these bouts of coughing and vomiting that tended to last. We changed milk, changed baby food, changed this, changed that, nothing helped. It wasn’t frequent (every 3 to 4 months), and since Nate had already showed he also had an allergic terrain (Augmentin an antibiotic) we were trying to pinpoint the source of this particular reaction. As he reached toddler years, this dwindled off and stopped.

When we moved when Nate was around 4-5 (again hindsight), Nate started getting frequent colds… but they were a little bit bizarre, because he would throw up clear liquid after prolonged bouts of coughing. But they cleared up after 4-5 days. It wasn’t until one cold started dragging on towards weeks that the Pediatrician asked me to film the next episode of “vomiting”, it had not happened in her sight… I did and we brought the video to her, she got a weird look on her face and said let me check his lungs again… looked up and said yeah I can hear the faint hiss…. Nate has asthma. She had never had a case of bronchial asthma before.

While I had dealt with children with asthma before, I too had never heard of bronchial asthma. This diagnostic was not easy for us, not because of the asthma in and of itself, but because of the treatment and the degradation of life in Haiti. It was not rare for us to spend a few weeks without electricity and the nebulizer required electricity. Rushing to the dr’s for severe attacks was not always possible with the riots outside.

Nate’s 14, he’s been hospitalized 6 times already ranging from 3 to 8-day stays. The first time was a “nick of time” type thing, I went to work, he woke up after I left and started coughing throwing up… the girl watching him for me called me and said Nate told her “Lea… I’m not well at all” I said take a taxi and bring him to me (the Ped was very close to my workplace) I called the ped and described the symptoms the girl had told me, listless, pale, weak, loss of liquid, she told me go directly to the hospital I’ll meet you there. They couldn’t find his veins for the IV so weak he was already… Ped said if we had waiting much longer, he would have fallen into a coma because he was so dehydrated from the coughing up fluids.

After the meds we were introduced to nebulizers (the pump would come around his 9th year). The attacks were seasonal for the most part, until his new school… there because of the ground rocks they used for the yard, Nate would have 15-20 attacks a day. We had a major scare when the Ped had us do an X-Ray of Nate’s lungs, and sent us to a specialist, when we got the X-Ray from the lad, the tech told us there was a weird “spot” on Nate’s right lung…. Our meeting with the specialist was 2 days away. I never slept a wink. When I finally saw the specialist and told her what the tech had said, she grabbed the X-Ray looked at it and scoffed, an idiot said, these are the lungs of a severely asthmatic child but no more. I sort of broke down right there.

We were advised to change his school, so we pulled him out, before we could go to a new school chaos erupted in Haiti and soon after Covid hit. So, Nate never went back to regular school.

Coming soon Part VI

Muriel Vieux

#TheAmericanHaitianPoet

November 1st, 2023

#Woke #SocialPoetry

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