(AG, one week old)
Last night I went to bed another year older, but back on my 23rd birthday in 1999 I went to bed heavily pregnant and woke up sometime after midnight on the verge of motherhood. Eleven or so hours of labor later, I gave birth to my first daughter.
Yep, AG’s ninth birthday is today, one day after mine. She wasn’t due until the middle of March, and it seems somehow par for the course that a surprise pregnancy ended in a surprise delivery.
But because of this early birth, she didn’t weigh much. Five pounds is a more than decent weight for a premature baby, and if I’m very honest with you I’ll admit she didn’t seem particularly small to me. Since I knew only one person with a child and the rest of my friends were years away from becoming parents themselves, I simply had little to no experience with babies.
Hospital visitors those first few days would say,
She’s so tiny. Look how small she is.
And I’d think, *Well, yeah. She’s a baby. Of course she’s small. Duh.*
I didn’t realize what all those other people meant until I gave birth to a 7 lb. second daughter almost three years later. Two extra pounds makes an enormous difference in a baby.
Enormous.
Low birth weight definitely could have predisposed AG to asthma. (That link’s a pdf, by the way). In fact, low birth weight and allergies on her father’s side are AG’s only risk factors. And while I could spend my whole life trying to figure out why, exactly, my daughter has asthma, I’d probably never find a definitive answer and knowing the cause wouldn’t change the treatment. Knowing the risk factors for asthma won’t really help a patient who already has it, but you should know if you or your undiagnosed kid has a higher chance of developing those telltale symptoms like excessive coughing, trouble breathing, or wheezing. And, like some other chronic diseases, there are always the risk factors you can control:
Asthma Risk Factors
1. Allergies – both food and environmental
2. Genetics – asthma and/or allergies in either side of the family, or both
3. Low birth weight
4. Urban settings
5. Work settings – includes some industrial and health care occupations, among others
6. Smoking – including maternal smoking during pregnancy and secondhand smoke
7. Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD)
8. Obesity – not fully understand, but the two appear related
9. Childhood respiratory infections – including RSV
Asthma is never this clear-cut, though. You know it, and I know it. Some people with all or most of the above risk factors never develop asthma, and plenty of others with no risk factors do. Equally puzzling is the enormous rise in asthma cases in the developed world in the past twenty years.
Whatever the reason AG has asthma or why her case of it is rather persistent, I’m terribly grateful that 5 lbs. of fragile baby girl turned into a beautiful, active, relatively healthy bundle of nine year-old kid:
I think low birth weight is a risk factor. I was 5 lbs when I was born, my sister was 8 lbs. Guess who has asthma, and guess who doesn’t. Both of us grew up in the same house, although I did have more respiratory infections then she did.
The other day I was looking for baby pictures of C to give to her dad and I found a bunch of pictures of you in the hospital giving birth to your beautiful baby un icorn, and a pic of AG when she was about one and at first I didn’t know who it was!!! She was so cute! we looked SO young, and afraid!!!!!! We still totally rock though!!!!!
Hi Brittney,
It’s interesting that low birthweight is more the risk factor than early birth (that’s my understanding, anyway). I’ve read that a full-term, underweight baby has a similar risk factor to an early baby of the same weight.
Cara,
I’m still afraid. Teenagerhood (is that a word?) is creeping up FAST.