Valkyre

An Afternoon Scare

Got a phone call this afternoon. I look over and it's Teresa's Junior High School. I pick up. "Your daughter is having difficulty breathing. She wasn't at P.E., she was at lunch when it happened. We don't know what triggered it. We do know she didn't fall." Huh? What? More comes out. She is feeling a tingling in her fingers. "Can I talk to her?" I thought that maybe she had had some kind of panic attack and maybe I could calm her down. They put her on the phone. All I hear is heavy gasping breaths. I can't even talk to her. I had her put the woman who I was talking to back on the line. I am still unclear as to what is going on..... "Would you like us to call 911?" I said, "Maybe......" And then, since I am now not thinking straight, for some odd reason I thought that maybe I would have to come up there before they could call... "Would you like me to come up there?"

Like I said, I thought that I had to be present while they called 911. Any rational thought was gone by now. "Yes!" the woman said, slightly agitated. I guess she must have thought that I was just going to lounge at home on the couch watching soap operas while my daughter struggled to breath. But, that's not what I meant at all. (By the way, the school nurse was gone due to Teresa being the 3rd child that had had some kind of breathing episode today.) I hang up with them and call Mike. Turns out he is about 6 miles closer to the school than I was. He rolled. By the time he had got up there, they already had her on a stretcher. 2 fire trucks, one paramedic unit and an ambulance. I had almost reached the school when Mike called me on my cell and told me to just go straight to the hospital. I turned around and made it to the hospital and parked on the opposite side of where they bring in the patients. You may think that's nothing, but this complex is huge. I run up to the information desk, "Can you tell me where they bring in the patients in the ambulances? A nice volunteer took me to where the ambulances dropped off the patients. Even though I had to walk across the complex, I still beat her ambulance there. Finally, I see it pull up and my daughter inside with an oxygen mask across her face. But, by then, she was breathing normally. Basically, she had hyperventilated. The tingling? I don't know the exact medical term, but it comes when you hypervetilate. You use up all your oxygen and your extremities start to tingle. Teresa's hands, her arms and her legs were tingling like that and she couldn't even walk. After they managed to get her to breath normally, she started to feel pins and needles in her arms, hands and legs as the oxygen started to flow normally. She limped around for awhile and then was able to walk. (They wouldn't release her unless she could walk on her own.) They took a chest x-ray and it checked out okay. So, she is home now. The only thing that they thought may have triggered it, may have been the fact that even though it was extremely hot and dry, the P.E. teachers still made the students run the mile today. All three kids that had episodes had run their miles. But, it took about an hour and a half for the symptoms to hit. Even though Teresa said that she had had trouble breathing after running the mile.