A Strange Kind of Busy

The past two weeks have been a very different kind of busy. Instead of trying to stay on top of cleaning, laundry, dishes, and Christmas preparations I've been preoccupied with a sick child. Allan began running a fever on November 19th which instead of improving became worse staying 102 - 103 even with Tylenol. A day later a cough was added to the list of ailments and then a sore throat. The Friday after Thanksgiving he was diagnosed with a "throat infection" and given an antibiotic. Through the weekend he did not improve and so back to the Dr. on Monday the 26th. His fever then was 103.4 (It's always nice when the child's symptoms stay the same when they're at the Dr's office so the staff knows you're not being an over-reactive mother!) She said everything looked and sounded fine but that we needed to do bloodwork (YEAHHH!!) and a chest x-ray to find out where the fever was coming from. I told Allan that when they "pinched" him we'd start counting to 10 and by the time we got to 10 they'd be done. Unfortunately they also had to do a blood culture and so we counted to 20 and then went back and counted to 10 again but while he was preoccupied counting he wasn't crying.

To make a long story short (since we left home at 10:30 in the morning and didn't arrive back home until 7:30) the chest x-ray showed a collapsed left lung so we were sent to the ER. There it was determined that he didn't have a collapsed lung but rather pneumonia. In my mind I thought, "Pneumonia is a serious sickness, give the child some medicine, they'll sleep for 2 or 3 days and then everything will be okay." Reality is: Pneumonia is a serious sick, they'll sleep for a week and be very lethargic even when awake, the fever will take 6 days to abate, they cough until you think they're going to cough their lungs out (particularly at night), you have to force them to eat and drink, the strong antibiotics cause some very nasty side effects, and you realize the most important thing you can do is spend extra time praying, trusting God, making soup, reading stories, giving backrubs, doing breathing treatments, and giving proper doses of medications. In general your life goes on hold.

Thankfully, Thursday evening his fever began to come down and today there was not fever. Philip slept with him last night and said there were no coughing spells either. He ate his first solid food on Friday and today he actually said he was hungry. I'm so very thankful for the Lord's help and strength these days. I'm also thankful for a husband who trades the night shift with me every other night so that I can get rest. Hopefully by tomorrow he'll be able to sleep alone again. We're now starting to resume some of the normal household routines (at least where Allan is concerned) and hopefully by the end of the week he'll be ready to enter back into the general population. This week I have a wedding cake so I won't be blogging until after that point. Life is good...although Philip said this evening he's not feeling very well.... :o)