First fever.

No photos because I couldn't even bring myself to take a photo of my poor moaning, feverish, coughing, wheezing, whining, sick as a dog baby. I could barely hold him because I kept crying I felt so badly for him. I'm sure this was not helpful big picture.

We gave him some children's Tylenol to get the fever down a little (was 102+) and it didn't work very well so we gave him children's Motrin, which promptly gave him hives, which we then treated with Benadryl, poor little monkey.

So Jon brought J to the doctor today (or actually, the nurse practitioner standing in for the doctor), I happened to call his cellie right as she was giving the advice so I got to sit in. Didn't realize I was on speaker phone or I wouldn't have actually laughed out loud when she said that his ears were red and he was wheezing a bit (um...really?) and he would get better faster with antibiotics but "some parents object" to this approach.

Well...here's hoping she gets a fricking subscription to the American Academy of Pediatrics e-journal or something because antibiotics are not actually recommended for garden variety ear infections anymore. Here is a link to the NYT article that discusses it for anyone interested. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F00E5D7113DF934A15752C1A960958260


I had to request a nebulizer treatment for him, "do you think it might be helpful?" I asked as if I had no idea. She went ahead and ordered that and I suggested we could take the prescription for the antibiotic and fill it if we felt it was necessary in a few days. We'll pick up an inhaler for him tomorrow and I'll use it if we need to.

Good reminder that we're lucky that our regular pediatrician (who wasn't in today) is not only open to alternative medicine, but actually smart and well read. As a matter of fact, the last time Julian had an ear infection and I offered up that we'd prefer not to do antibiotics she looked horrified and said that she would never give a baby antibiotics for an ear infection as it is just as likely to go away on its own. Would it be too presumptuous to send the NP a copy of the recent research article? I think I'm going to do it...

OK, one photo from before the dreaded sickness...for the junkies.