Avoiding the ER

It's late, but my husband is giving my son a Xopenex treatment here in the living room as I type, to help to improve his breathing. Since the age of 5 weeks, he has struggled with asthmatic problems, but there had been a gap of over a year since the last serious incident. We spent about three hours this afternoon at the pediatrician's office and may have spent the night in the ER, but I asked if we would really be seen right away or not. Usually when I go to the ER in our neighborhood, we're there for 3 hours until we are seen by the doctor. And then sometimes it's another three hours after that before we can go home. I asked the doctor if she could make a call to the ER to help us to get in earlier, and at first she said she could do that, but she's only been at this practice for two weeks, and I wondered how she might pull off a favor like that. In the end, she gave us the prescriptions and sent us on our way with instructions to give my son a treatment by nebulizer every 3 hours and to come back to the office in the morning. No school tomorrow. I hope I can get some work done and that Doug can come home early enough so I can go to my class to hand in the paper I'm still working on.