Jinger Duggar and her husband Jeremy Vuolo recently dealt with a scary situation while traveling in Texas. Though the Counting On couple’s 4-year-old daughter Evangeline showed no signs of being sick during the day, she later developed a serious cough and struggled to breathe. The alarming cough prompted Jinger and Jeremy to take their daughter to the emergency room.
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Jeremy heard their daughter coughing at around 10:30 p.m. one night.
Jinger and Jeremy, who are parents to Evangeline and 6-year-old Felicity and are currently expecting baby No. 3, opened up about the scary experience during the Wednesday, December 18 episode of The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast. Jeremy detailed the moment he heard their daughter’s scary cough. “I run into her room where she’s sleeping and she is kind of hunched over struggling to breathe,” he described. Her cough sounded “almost like a croup cough” and like she was gasping for air.
The parents rushed to the hospital with their daughter.
Jinger and Jeremy decided to drive to the hospital instead of calling for an ambulance because they thought driving would be quicker. While Jeremy said he was driving safely, he described “flying” to the hospital, which was about 10 minutes away from where the family was staying. When they got to the hospital, medical staff checked their daughter’s pulse. Thankfully, her condition was stable.
Jeremy, who struggled with asthma as a child, continued to observe Evangeline while they were in the waiting room, checking to see if her condition remained “consistent.”
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Evangeline had seemed totally fine that day.
While any situation like the one they were facing is frightening, the medical scare caught the parents off guard because their daughter had seemed fine all day. “She had the best day, no signs of a cold, no signs of anything that would have led you to think, ‘oh, she’s sick,'” Jinger explained. “She was not low energy.”
Because Evangeline didn’t seem sick at all that day, her breathing issues seemingly came “out of nowhere.” It “just was such a shock and it was super scary,” Jinger added.
They're still not sure what caused her cough and breathing issues.
Ultimately, doctors gave Evangeline a steroid to treat the issue, but Jinger and Jeremy still don’t know exactly what was wrong with her. Doctors assumed she might’ve been dealing with croup, though Jinger and Jeremy both suspect something else triggered their daughter’s symptoms. “We’re going to get some more tests done just to make sure she’s good,” Jinger explained. “Rule out asthma or allergies or things like that.”
Luckily, the steroid helped treat whatever Evangeline was dealing with. Earlier in the podcast, Jinger detailed another possible explanation for Evangeline’s health scare. “She just had a little episode of something where a doctor even thought maybe she had inhaled something and aspirated maybe a piece of food and it might have been lodged in there,” Jinger said. “So by the time she got a steroid and all, she was breathing well again, but it was just for a little bit of time it was kind of scary.”
'You have to just kind of take the curveballs as they come,' Jinger said.
Though Jinger and Jeremy are both “thankful” that their daughter seems to be doing well, the whole experience was definitely “a little bit of a scare.” The parents still plan to “get to the bottom of it” even though Evangeline’s tests all came back normal.
“We kept our composure. In those moments, you’re praying and you’re asking the Lord to give peace and just to watch over,” Jeremy said, adding that having “dear friends” nearby helped them cope.
