Illness Induced Asthma

This is long, but I wanted to document it for "journaling" purposes. Last Wednesday morning, when Brayden got up, he was coughing and it started out sounding a little "croupy", but then went to a normal but forceful, dry sounding cough. We know the croup cough very well since he got it ALL THE TIME when he was little, but he "outgrew" it and hasn't really had a problem with it in about 18 months or so. By Thursday, the coughing was NON STOP! He wasn't fevered, and didn't have any other "symptoms" other than a cough, but the girls had just gotten over colds, so I just had him do what we normally do when he gets a cold....rest and drink! Now for him, the coughing isn't uncommon. It seems like every time he gets a cold, he always gets a cough that lasts for a week or two (even though the girls won't get the cough) and it is always so forceful that he can't sleep well, and even gags/throws up a little because he coughs so hard. By Thursday evening, he was complaining that his stomach hurt (I just figured his abs were sore from coughing non stop) and that his chest was hurting. We were watching a movie and had him lift up his shirt so I could watch his breathing and I didn't really like what I saw (again, because of the croup, our doctor gave me things to watch out for with his breathing). So, since Scott was at Scout camp all week, I put the girls down for bed and called my family and my sister came over to sit at the house while I took him to the doctor. We got there and they took his vitals, listened to why I was there, and then watched him breathe. He was retracting quite a bit (he actually sounded pretty normal when he breathed, just a little more shallow, but he was really struggling to breathe) and when the doctor listened to him breathe, she said he wasn't moving hardly any air on the left side of his lungs and the right side was better, but wasn't where it should be either. She informed me that in her opinion, with his history I had shared and questions she had asked, she thought he was an "asthmatic that we weren't aware of yet". They quickly gave him a breathing treatment, did chest X-rays to check for pneumonia or other things that could be causing him to not be able to move air out of the left lung (luckily that came back clean) gave him steroids, watched him for quite a while, and sent us home with an inhaler to give him 4 times a day throughout the weekend. From what the doctor thinks (it was the Kids Care/InstaCare doctor, not our normal Pediatrician)he has "illness induced asthma". We made an appointment with our regular Pediatrician on Friday, and discussed things with her and she agrees, so for now, we just have to watch him when he gets colds or other illnesses and starts getting that dang forceful cough! Hopefully it won't progress into any more severe forms of asthma later in life! It was AMAZING to see the difference in a short amount of time after the breathing treatment at the doctors. He went from being lethargic and tired/weak (but it was also bedtime and he didn't have a nap since he had been coughing all day long and couldn't sleep) to back to his normal joking, silly self by the time we left! Not to mention the coughing basically went away (with the exception of just the occasional one here and there)! Hopefully this knowledge will make things so much easier for him when he gets colds, and then we can just give him the inhaler, and he won't have to suffer through weeks of coughing all day and night! It always broke our hearts listening to him cough his little heart out and nothing we did ever helped (humidifiers, drinks, elevating his head, and so on....) It is so nice to have my active little boy back!