Ended up at the ER last night
A & M went swimming yesterday. This is just about A though. She decided to take her swim test at the YMCA and passed it on the first try. This means we can be anywhere on site and not in arms reach. Realistically it means we’ll probably be in the pool and she can go on water slides, but that’s another story.
We got booted from the outdoor pool because a water aerobics class and went to the much smellier indoor pool. It smells like chlorine took a bromine bath in there. A while into swimming in there A’s voice started getting squeaky and she started coughing just a little bit. I was coughing a bit as well and we discussed it and I told her I suspected she had chlorine cough / swimmer’s cough as we’d been fine outside and the place was much more chlorinated smelling.
Her throat was hurting a little, and so was mine. I told her if she would just stop talking a bit she’d be fine and she took that to mean talk non-stop for the next 30 minutes in increasingly failing voice. I told her she was going to lose her voice if she didn’t chill but nope.
I swapped out watching her with Kim, and went to warm up in the sauna for a minute. When I got out Kim was rushing to get everyone’s clothes on and told me A had swallowed a bunch of water. She was crying and upset and I didn’t know what was going on.
What A told me: Swallowed some water, coughed it up, throat hurt a bit
What A told mom – something similar but without the coughing up and that she was having trouble speaking and it was like she was breathing through a straw.
This is alarming because A’s been in the hospital twice as a baby for breathing issues where her trachea inflamed and she was sucking air through an ever decreasing straw. This was not that.
What it evidently was – nose clogged after water got in it, chlorine cough.
It ended up A and mom went to the hospital. I took M back to the house and we changed and grabbed snacks and entertainment and went back to the hospital. Me and M walked in, talked to the attending, and were taken to the room. A & Mom weren’t there. We beat them to the room by about 7 minutes.
By this point, which was 40 minutes from the pool A’s voice was mostly back. This is what I’d told her. Get out of the pool, your voice will come back. I asked her a few questions while we were waiting and yup, not much… she’d sucked down some water and coughed it up… this combined with chlorine cough / voice looked amazingly like drowning to mom. A had said absolutely nothing to concern me and I had zero to tell a doctor.
Blood O2 was normal. Lungs listened to had nothing in them. We opted to not chest x-ray as literally everything seemed fine. We were given the symptoms of dry-drowning to look out for and went home. Today she had no fever, SpO2 in normal adult range (94/95%) as taken by a child (meaning she kept moving the entire time and was probably a % or two more.)
A was terrified of taking the swimming test because she thought she might fail. She didn’t, and she didn’t come close to failing either. She was terrified of the hospital, but other than being cold because she was in a swimsuit she was fine.
She got to bed after 9 last night. It’d taken the hospital longer to discharge a healthy kiddo than it had to get her seen and verified.
Kiddo had given slightly altered statements between me and mom, and as such I had zero concerns and mom had tons. I suffer from the YMCA’s indoor pool and know what it does to my voice, skin, etc so I know what it was doing to her and knew it would go away about 30 minutes after she got away from it. Her voice was nearly completely normal at 40 minutes.
We got discharge papers that state she had suffered from non-fatal drowning, which is what I believe I’m going to start calling swimming from now on.
