In Which I Get Medical Advice From An Oompa Loompa, And Distrust It

Tags

baby, colds, common cold, coughing, daycare, doctor, pediatrician, sick, sleep, toddler, virus, winter

Owl coughs.

He’s been doing it for months and months. Ever since he got croup, really. It’s practically part of his personality, now. We hardly notice it. His nose runs, and it gives him post nasal drip, and then he coughs, mostly at night when he’s lying down and we’re trying to sleep.

(Incidentally, this is hilarious, especially when you’re really tired.) 

At first I took him back to the doctor for it. Each time the doctor told me it was “probably viral” and that colds are common in the first winter in daycare.

“He’ll basically have colds non-stop all winter,” said the pediatrician jovially (my pediatrician looks exactly like a human sized Oompa Loompa. Not the weird orange men from the Gene Wilder film but Oompa Loompas as described by Roald Dahl).

How I imagine my doctor’s family must look

Plus Owl tended to pick up worse colds from his visits to the doctor’s office. So I gave up.

But Daycare Lady didn’t.

“I’m sure he needs antibiotics or something,” she said. “He’s always coughing, and it sometimes sounds like there’s boiling water in his chest.”

Every now and then the coughing gets worse.

It happened again this weekend. His coughing was so bad that PH was up with him again and again in the night, and gave up entirely at 3 am  when he handed me Owl in bed (usually it’s between 4:30 and 5:30 am when Owl joins me in bed).

Even in the car he’d cough and cough. When he breathes his chest sounds like it’s percolating coffee.

After the third night of this PH said, “take him to the pediatrician.”

Daycare Lady wholeheartedly agreed.

“You have to PUSH them. My brother is a pediatrician and when my little girl was small he told me that from what I was saying over the phone, he was sure she had pneumonia. I took her to the ER and the ER doctor said she was fine! Viral! Go home! So I said “you PROVE to me it’s viral!” and I insisted on an xray and the xray showed pneumonia!”

So I went in determined this time.

When Jolly Doc came in I explained that he has been coughing for months. Sometimes it’s worse than others but always THERE.

“Does it get better and then worse again?” he asked.

“Yes!”

“It’s a cold.”

“An eight month long cold?”

“No, he just keeps getting colds one on top of the other. Happens all the time in daycare in winter.”

“But it’s June!”

“The cold season seems to be lasting longer than usual. We’ve had a cool spring.”

“But there’s only four other kids at his dayhome and none of them are sick!”

“You can’t tell me that the other kids never get colds.”

“No, they get colds occasionally, but they get sick, with stuffy noses and coughs and fevers and then a week later they’re over it. Owl’s symptoms are non-stop, and his nose rarely gets really clogged. It’s just constantly draining clear or yellow snot.”

“Because he keeps catching new colds before the old ones are done! I see this all the time. There’s no point in doing tests and no medicine will help you. His lungs don’t sound asthmatic, and I don’t think it’s allergies – you say it happened all through the winter, so it’s not likely seasonal.”

“Some units in our complex have had problems with mold, but we vacuumed and washed his bedding…”

“Yeah, and he hasn’t had a history of lung problems or breathing problems. This doesn’t look like allergies. It looks like a cold.”

“But he always looks like this!”

“Yes, well,” he laughed, “we call them “snot-nosed kids” for a reason!”

He DID say he would refer me to an eye doctor about Owl’s clogged tear duct. He said they usually resolve on their own but after a year he gets them dealt with “you’ve been surprisingly patient.”

Yes, well, considering my child is constantly coughing, a teary eye hasn’t really been high in my priorities.

I left feeling so frustrated.

How does he know that Owl hasn’t had the same persistant infection ever since October? Maybe he fights it off for a while and it keeps coming back. Why is he the only kid in his daycare who is constantly coughing up phlegm?

would you like some snot with that?

But I’m really frigging tired and I don’t see why he is constantly suffering from colds that no one else seems to be giving to him, or catching from him.

You Need A Cold Just To Pronounce It

Tags

babies, birds, chemicals, common cold, consonants, cribs, labels, mattresses, naps, phthalates, viruses, words

The crib mattress arrived yesterday! I noticed that its label proudly advertises that it is “Phthalate compliant”. What does that mean? Does that mean it has phthalates, or doesn’t have phthalates? Or does it mean that it only has a certain arbitrarily-decided maximum number of phthalates?

Everything seems to be about the phthalates these days. Perfect Husband and I spotted the word on a bag of dog treats in the pet store a couple months ago and were immediately struck by the awesomeness of such an unpronounceable word. How many other words can you think of that begin with four (FOUR!) consonants?* In a world where people have difficulty with single syllable words like “you’re” and “their”, I feel that unleashing such a combination of letters on the unsuspecting public makes up for exposing us to the phthalates themselves.

Now that word seems to be everywhere. Everything must be chock full of phthalates because we’ve noticed quite a range of products announcing themselves “phthalate free”. Or maybe they were always free of phthalates, but are now promoting that fact, the way that high sugar cereals announce that they are “fat free”, as though they used to be up there with lard and sour cream, but are now the dietary equivalents of Kate Moss.

Anyhoo, we now have a fully functioning crib. Unfortunately, Babby has picked up a nasty cold, which I am now coming down with as well. I don’t know what sucks more about having a sick baby – dealing with those heart-rending coughs and snuffles, or trying to take care of a cranky baby when you feel as though someone stuffed a hammer up your left nostril.

Completed nursery FTW

Since he’s so wheezy and incapable of breathing, this seems like a poor time to try and transition him anywhere. He did sleep for two hours in the crib yesterday after I nursed him down in his snowsuit. I hung out in the room the whole time so that if he woke up I’d be right there. I didn’t want his first sleep there to be too disorienting. I have also been giving him playtime in there to help him feel familiar with it.

Today was a total no-go for sleeping there. He was so miserable and having so much trouble breathing that he woke up the second I started to lower him in. I don’t want him thinking of his crib as That Place Where I Can’t Breathe, so I just went back to my bedroom to nurse him down there as per usual.

His room is probably full of phthalates, anyway.

Sooky Babby is Sooky

* Yes, that is a challenge. They do exist, but “y” doesn’t count.

ETA: In answer to your unspoken question, I thought the birds were gone but I must be wrong, because the noises just started up again. An eagle-like cry followed by a squeaky hinge noise followed by a series of high pitched tweets that resemble maniacal laughter.

Happy Four-Months, Babby!

Tags

4 month old, babies, breast milk, child development, common cold, infant sleep, over stimulation, tummy time

Babby is four months old today!

Babby enters 2011!

He had his appointment with the pediatrician on Wednesday, the day he turned 17 weeks old.

Good news – his weight gain this month was fine. He’s now 6 kilograms, and seems to be holding steady just under the 15th percentile. The pediatrician was happy and says that Babby may have been “finding his own size” and will probably maintain this place in the percentiles. That’s fine with me. It was dropping from 85th to 15th that I didn’t like.

For the most part, parenting Babby is easier than it used to be. He no longer stays awake for 8 hour stretches,

He gets bored quickly though, so I have to walk him around the house a lot, showing him a bookshelf and letting him run his hands along the books, then showing him a curtain and letting him finger the curtain, and so on ad nauseum.  I trawled Craigslist and am sending Perfect Husband on a pick-up errand to get a Jolly Jumper for ten bucks after work today. I’m not thoroughly convinced that it won’t shatter my baby’s legs, but dangit, I need new ways to amuse this kid.

He does like his tummy time mat if I prop him on a pillow so he can’t flip himself over immediately. He likes to grab the toys I place in front of them with both hands, and then he opens his mouth wiiiiiiiiide like a monster from a Japanese action flick, and brings the toy to his mouth where he bites down on it viciously.

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…Unfortunately, it is so exciting that his delighted squeals and aggressive toy-eating quickly devolve into over stimulated screeching. He looks both delighted and angry all at once and I have to come rescue him before his rage gets the upper hand.

Babby’s evening sleeping patterns have fallen apart recently. He has been waking almost hourly some nights. You hear a lot about the “4 month sleep regression”, and I don’t know if this is it, or if the  problem is a result of the fact that Babby has been fighting off my cold. He had a fever last week, which is around the time that the sleep fell apart. But then it went away and it seemed fine, except for his waking up screaming every hour all night long. Now he is starting to sniffle and cough, and yet his sleep was BETTER last night.

I have no idea what’s going on.

I mean, he has reflux, AND he is fighting off a cold AND he’s been chewing on his hands and drooling for weeks now, so we think he’s starting to teethe. He could be all kinds of uncomfortable. So how do you know what causes any particular unexpected wake-up?

I’m very, very tired, since I’m getting over this cold myself. Also, the day Babby suddenly started snuffling was the day my sore throat came back with a vengeance.

(As a side note, being unable to succumb to the cold medications and just CRASH is a new form of torture. Being kept up repeatedly in the night when your body wants to sleep and heal itself is decidedly un-fun. Poor Perfect Husband came down with the cold too, but since Babby doesn’t need his father’s boobas to eat, PH had the luxury of collapsing into a ten hour sleep of the dead while I glared malevolently at his recumbent form, consumed by jealousy. He made up for it the next day by contritely taking Babby downstairs and giving him a bottle of pumped milk while I caught a couple more hours’ sleep.)

Anyway, I am getting rid of Babby’s cold once and for all.

…This morning, I put breast milk up his nose.