I like Thanksgiving even if I have no great love of turkey and am kind of grossed out by the gluttony factor. See, while I know the healthy approach to life involves daily gratitude and letting the little things go, my perspective is generally less peaceful and accepting. I am the kind of person who counts her blessings only when guilted or forced into it, so the idea of a holiday of enforced, planned gratitude makes perfect sense to me. In that spirit, let me share with you some asthma-specific ways I’m giving thanks this year.
Today, I’m feeling grateful for online children’s health communities and especially for the messageboard I frequented during Asthma Girl’s roughest years. The thing about having a child with asthma or any other chronic health problem–and no one tells you this at diagnosis–is that it can be such a lonely existence. Even if you have friends with children, they probably can’t understand the panic of dealing with a toddler’s flare in the middle of the night. Asthma in a young child also often means a lot of staying home, a lot of trips to the doctor, a lot of spending your day nursing your child and making sure she doesn’t stop breathing. Parenting a child with uncontrolled asthma is terrifying, especially if you live away from your family the way I did when AG was little.
The Parentsplace messageboard no longer exists, but when it did I spent hours online, asking questions about my daughter’s health, getting advice, complaining about doctors, learning about asthma, and just simply communicating with other parents also struggling with this very scary lung disease in their children. Sometimes it simply helped to read posts from parents with older, well-controlled kids. They gave me hope that AG might someday sleep regularly without coughing and breathing too fast for half the night, that she might one day contract colds and viruses and not end up in the ER.
Hope is important when your kid has a chronic health problem. It’s very hard to get that asthma diagnosis, and talking to other parents helps.
Today, I read some messageboard posts from a mother whose young son probably has asthma, and they made me remember those early years with Asthma Girl. Today, I am grateful for those Parentsplace moms who shared their knowledg and for the online communities that let parents like me connect with one another.
