Jeremy The Germ

Jack watches a kid’s tv channel that has a character called ‘Jeremy the Germ’. He teaches kids about hand washing and germs. Jack asked if Jeremy could come over sometime. Well, Jeremy has definitely been over to our house along with his gang. It’s time to kick Jeremy and his buddies the hell out!

I try to post on our blog all things that have been going on in our lives, even if it’s not particularly the fun stuff because that is reality sometimes. So here’s what happened. Jack has been on and off with a cold literally since early October. Sniffles and a cough set in and just haven’t gone away. The first time, it was just a typical little cold. But it seemed to linger. Around Halloween, he was sick and Allie had just sniffles. The first week of November, however, Jack developed an up-at-night wake you from a deep sleep awful cough. This began the weekly visits to the pediatrician. Jack got an ear infection as he commonly does if a cold hangs on for too long. It went away, but came back and I started getting a nagging feeling he would relapse with another ear infection.

Fast forward…

A handful of doctor visits later, an argument with his pediatrician’s, a switch to a new pediatrician, and here we are before RSV…

and now during…

Jack was never as sick in his life as he was last week. He is MUCH better after another round of antibiotics, and breathing treatments, but now has a double ear infection. Problem is, he had a very common respiratory virus called RSV that most kids get, and we confirmed this last week with a nasal swab. Usually kids get it and it’s just a bad cold. That is, unless you are a baby. If you get RSV and you are younger than 6 months, it can be far more serious, and can turn into bronchiolitis. So that’s where Allie is at. I saw how sick Jack was last week and thought to myself that if Allie was headed down that same road, she’d end up in the hospital. Her airway is simply too small to handle that amount of “germies” as Jack says.

And so that is why I am typing this blog entry from the hospital. Allie was back and forth to the ER with me because she couldn’t feed well from being so congested. She was so tired and had a high fever. We were admitted today to help get her through this. She has an IV for fluids, a tent for humidified air (to help her breath better, and is on an apnea monitor and continuous o2 sat monitoring (that info is for my RN girl’s). She has had deep suctioning and is trying very very hard to breath because her little lungs are so congested and inflammed.