Babies make all kinds of noises, cries and gurgles. But when an infant wheezes, parental confusion quickly gives way to fear. That’s how Nicole Fulciniti of Lake Ronkonkoma, NY, felt when her baby, David, seemed to be struggling to breathe.

“Wherever you stood in the house, you could hear him,” Nicole said. “The wheezing was very scary.” Plus, the baby wasn’t eating or sleeping well.

This was back in 2007, and Nicole and her husband, also named David, took their 3-month-old to the pediatrician right away, thinking he just had a bad cold. But it was obvious pretty quickly that it was more than that. The pediatrician diagnosed the baby with bronchiolitis, a common lung infection in young children that causes inflammation and airway constriction.

The pediatrician prescribed antibiotics and albuterol (an inhaled steroid), but David didn’t improve. Instead, within weeks his illness progressed to pneumonia. One night during a feeding, David’s lips turned blue. Nicole rushed him to the emergency department. “We were just sick to our stomachs, thinking the unthinkable,” she said.

The hospital changed David’s medication and stabilized him, but it was clear that the treatment wasn’t healing him.

The Fulcinitis searched for a specialist who could help, and met Maria Santiago, MD, a pediatric pulmonologist at Cohen Children’s Medical Center. Dr. Santiago ordered testing to check for respiratory allergies and anything that could be compressing David’s airways. She prescribed nebulizer treatments for asthma, which produced rapid and welcome improvement.

“Within two days he was clearly better,” Nicole said. “I was finally able to start enjoying him, and he was never hospitalized for the same problem again.”

That said, David’s early history left him at risk for repeated episodes of wheezing and difficulty breathing. And it was routine as he grew for the usual childhood viruses, such as colds, to blossom into bronchitis or pneumonia. He continued to see Dr. Santiago two to three times a year. When he turned 5, she started performing lung function tests, further confirming his asthma diagnosis.

“Those tests have consistently shown that David’s small airways are compromised,” Dr. Santiago said. “When he comes off medication, after a couple of weeks, his lung function becomes slightly obstructed, indicating that there is still some inflammation in his lungs.”

Now 13, David is still under Dr. Santiago’s care. Over the years, she has adjusted his maintenance medication. Thanks to a combination of an oral asthma medication and an inhaled steroid, he no longer gets bronchitis or pneumonia with every virus or change of season. For the last several years, when he gets a cold, it’s just a cold.

Now, David’s well enough to ride his dirt bike. “His lungs are healthy enough to deal with that, which is not something we imagined when he was a baby,” Nicole said. “Dr. Santiago was an answer to our prayers. Finding just the right protocol for David changed our whole family’s lives,” she said.