Amy complained of chest pains on Monday night. She said she'd had them on Saturday night after the Kindergarten Festival, and again on Sunday night at the barbecue, and that it was worse tonight. She said it felt tight, and her heart was beating too hard. I was pretty sure it was asthma, but as ventolin affects the heart, I was not sure about giving it to her. My doctor student was due to come for her lesson, she's a cardiac/thoracic specialist! Ironically, she chose that day to not turn up. I gave Amy the ventolin, and then checked the internet, where I read that chest pain is indeed a symptom of asthma. And that chest pain in children is almost never related to the heart, and is usually symptomatic of relatively minor, self-limiting complaints.
Next day though, I took her to the hospital, as a relapse of asthma needed to be looked into. She had stopped the flixotide about three weeks earlier. After being reassured by the five or so pediatric websites that started out with the reassurance that chest pain in children is almost never the heart, I almost had a heart-attack when the doctor kept checking her heart, then said he was ordering a chest x-ray and electro-cardiogram. That she had arrythmia.
So, I spend another nasty awful hour in that place, wondering why my little girl has to be so ill, over and over again. I was optimistic, but you can't help but worry. But I held it together enough to make her laugh during her electro-cardiogram - I told her she looked like a sheet on the clothes line, because the huge pegs they used on her arms and legs looked like the pegs we use on our clothes poles. Ask Jo about our pegs!
Her lungs are clear, and she has a small arrhythmia, but within normal range. She is back on flixotide, but since her lungs are quite clear, only one puff a day, just to stop it getting worse over summer.
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