Archive for October 13th, 2009
October 10th:
The teething. It was, shall we say, intense and Ava had a cold on top of that so our weekend trip to see my mom on her birthday was postponed.
October 11th:
Happy Birthday, Mom!
Good choice to stay home, though. The sickness was worsening and we noticed an ear tug here and there.
October 12th:
J had the day off and had big plans to spend the day with Ava – although it didn’t originally involve spending a large portion of that day with the pediatrician. However, once I got her up and saw that she’d scratched her ears to the point of having raw and bleeding spots in and behind both ears the plans changed rather quickly.
Diagnosis was a combination of teething pain and the beginnings of a double ear infection due to the build up of fluid caused by the cold/sinus infection she had. Doc prescribed Amox.icillin, to begin that night, and we anticipated a quick recovery.
October 13th:
Or maybe not.
I woke her up and was horrified to see her little face swollen and with a rash on her cheeks, neck, and torso. Not only were her little ears still mangled she was now itching and scratching at her face something fierce. I freaked out, of course, and called J at work first and then the doctor’s office next. I refused to get off the phone until I spoke to someone that very minute so our favorite nurse came on the line posthaste. I 99.9% knew what was going on here so rather than go into the office for a walk in appointment I instead emailed a photo from my cell phone and got a response back straight away. Allergic reaction.
I had to get her on to Benadryl right away and heavy dose her (under doctor’s orders) every 4 hours (day and night) for 2 days. There was rapid improvement as soon as she got the first dose in her.
Light Bulb Moment:
When we met Ava in China she was sick. She had a cold and the orphanage director gave us two different types of medication – one was an herbal mixture of some sort and the other was Am.oxicillin. The antibiotic had only been opened that morning and she’d had one dose before they brought her to us. One of the first things we noticed was her flushed appearance and a slight rash on her cheeks. The orphanage director told our guide that Ava was super healthy and this was the first time she’d been sick (therefore I’m assuming it was likely to be the first time she’d been given antibiotics at all).
Because I couldn’t read the instructions on the bottle and no one translated them for us until the next day we did not give her anymore of the Amox in China. Well, that, and the fact that I believed she just had a cold anyway caused us to forego the antibiotics. We did, however, give her a teeny bit of Benadryl to help her sleep since her nose was running like a faucet and causing her to wake up coughing due to the post-nasal drip.
So the light bulb moment came when I realized that she’d had an allergic reaction to the antibiotic in China – we just didn’t know it at the time and we just happened to counteract it by giving her the Benadryl for the nasal drip. The possibility of this never even crossed my mind before and we’d not encountered it here since she’d never been on Amoxicil.lin in the nearly 2 years we’ve been home.
Aftermath:
The doc called in a new antibiotic to start after we finished a couple days of Benadryl. It played havoc on her tummy but got the ears better pretty quickly.
It ended up being a blessing in disguise that we kept her out of daycare for 3 days as two kids in her class ended up coming down with H1N1. This may have helped her avoid the flu – who knows?
And, most importantly, I learned to never, ever give the first dose of a new medication only hours before putting her to bed…despite following the instructions from the doc. It horrifies me – really, really scares me – to think that she could have had a much worse reaction and we would not have known anything was wrong. Even though we checked on her before we went to bed we didn’t see the rash forming due to the low light in her room and she never cried out to let us know she was uncomfortable or itchy or feeling poorly.
Poor baby. One more incident for me to add to the ever-growing stacks of things to feel bad about. Parental guilt – it is everywhere!