Poorly Timed Illnesses

Poor Margaret. Lately she has been the victim of poorly timed illnesses.

Case in point: We go to the beach annually with a large group of friends. We rent a big house, stay for a week, have lots of fun. We deliberately rent a place only a couple of hours away from my parents so that my mom can spend the weekend with Margaret. That was the plan this year. A few weeks ago, we dropped M off with my mom on Saturday, then drove the two hours down to the beach house. We had a lovely time there, Henry was sleeping well, we enjoyed our time with friends and only one kid, and set about relaxing. Margaret and Mom went to a party for a coworker of Mom's who was moving on, and M played with another little girl her age. They planned to go to the zoo the following day.

Unfortunately, the next morning, my mom called me and said Margaret had spent the evening with a high fever (103), and maybe I should come back, because M had wailed for me all night. So I packed up Henry and took a couple of days worth of clothes, fully expecting to be back at the beach the next day. It's pretty common for M to have a high fever, and a day later act as if she was never sick. So I left Wes at the beach with our friends, because I knew that M was only going to want Mommy, and my mom could help with Henry. Besides, one of us should use that beach house we were renting.

For the record, whenever we travel, I bring along at least one health reference book. HOWEVER, for no good reason, I decided I didn't need to pack a health book this time. After all, what could happen???

When I get there, Margaret also has a HORRIBLE sounding cough. It was really really tight sounding, and her throat really hurt. Every time she coughed, she clutched her chest and cried. So with the high fever, I was more worried than usual. I'm pretty conservative about medicines in general, tending to prefer to let the body's immune system work things out on it's own, but I also wanted my poor girl to get better fast so she had a chance of enjoying her vacation. So I brought her to the local urgent care center. I really wanted someone to listen to her chest, since her cough sounded so awful. Luckily, her chest sounded ok. In retrospect, I should have made the dr. give her a strep screen, just so I knew for sure it was/wasn't strep, but he didn't want to do it because it's so traumatic for little kids to do that. Sure, but whatever. It was stressful enough to be with my sick kid, visiting a new doctor whose perspective I didn't know, etc. He said he thought it was a viral infection, and therefore not much we could do but wait. He did, however, give us a scrip for antibiotics and a cough medicine, which I went ahead and got filled so I wouldn't have to go back out. I didn't intend to give her the antibiotics unless she didn't get better the next day. Normally, I wouldn't give them to her unless several days passed without improvement or we knew for sure that she had a bacterial infection, but hey, if it was something bacterial, I wanted her to get better sooner rather than later. I looked up the cough syrup (promethazine with DM) on WebMD when I got home and decided not to give it to her, because it had some scary side effects and the cough wasn't keeping her awake. I actually was surprised he prescribed a cough suppressant, since I was more worried that the stuff in her chest was too tight and she needed to cough to keep it loose. Obviously, I'm a notorious questioner of doctors.

So we spent the day pushing fluids (I bought her a new princess sippy cup to encourage the drinking of water, since she kept asking for milk, which I wouldn't give her) and the night keeping the fever down so she could sleep. I bounced back and forth between the bed where M was, and the floor where Henry was. I really wanted to keep them apart so that *maybe* Henry wouldn't get sick. The next day, she still had a fever, so I went ahead and gave her the antibiotics just in case, although I didn't really expect them to do any good. I also got some probiotics and yogurt to counteract the abx side effects. And we waited. And watched Barney videos over and over. The next day was the same. We ultimately spent Sunday through Wednesday there. Tuesday night, M's fever got to 105.5. The next day, her fever seemed to be gone, but she was still pretty crabby. But, after a 4 hour afternoon nap, I figured we should go ahead and try to get on with some of our vacation. So we drove back to the beach that night and spent two days on the beach. Unfortunately, Margaret didn't ever really get comfortable with the beach. She wouldn't get in the water even once.

So on the heels of that illness, it's a couple of weeks later, and on the morning of a long awaited birthday party, Margaret wakes up vomiting. So no birthday party. And for the record, M usually gets sick on the weekends, when we can't go to the doctor.

Apparently, Henry is following in his sister's footsteps, since he *did* get Margaret's illness, although without the fever, thank goodness. He did have a horrific cough on Memorial Day weekend, which sent me to call the nurse line in case we needed to go to the hospital. Luckily, the nurse decided it was just congestion and he was so much better by Tuesday that I didn't feel the need to take him in.

So apparently Margaret is on track to be sick for all of the fun events of the summer. Maybe I shouldn't plan anything just in case.