Tale of Woe

How's the new year been treating you? I'm hoping yours is going better than mine.

Daniel, my two-year-old, came down with a cold back on December 17. I got it the next day. I shook it off in a little more than a week, but his nose just stayed stuffed up, though by Christmas he was acting pretty normal. But then he started to cough. At first, it was just one of those post-nasal-drip coughs, kinda dry, which is what I had too. But on New Year's Eve, it turned into a wet, chesty cough. He ran a low fever that evening for a while, though thankfully that went away by bedtime. But he woke up coughing several times that night and for the next couple of nights. Which means I woke up too, because I'd hear him over the baby monitor. One night, he and I were awake for over an hour -- every time I (and probably he) would just about doze off, he'd cough again.

So I took him to the doctor yesterday, and they said that although we can't hear it, his lungs are wheezing again. Last winter, about this same time, he had a cold that went into his chest and he was wheezing audibly, so I took him to the doctor and ended up renting a nebulizer for a week to give him Albuterol treatments. Well, although we couldn't hear him wheezing this time around, the doctor could via the stethoscope.

And so yesterday's trip to the doctor at noon turned into a four-and-a-half-hour ordeal involving lunch, renting a nebulizer at a medical supply store, two trips to the pharmacy, and a parking ticket for spending 40 minutes at the Post Office for what should have been a 15-minutes-tops stop to mail a package.

The good news is, the nebulizer does seem to help him breathe better, and he slept for almost 11 hours with no coughing last night. The not-as-good news is that the medicine they gave to loosen up the mucous in his lungs makes him hyper, but it also lowers his immune system, so we're supposed to avoid contact with other germs as much as we can, ie, I can't take him out in public places to run off his excess energy.

And my husband came down with the cold at the end of last week too.

So, that's my tale of woe. I'm praying it's not a portent of things to come in 2010! And I hope you've been having a much better year so far :-)

EDIT: They haven't diagnosed Daniel with asthma, however, so that's a blessing. If this happens again, then they would probably diagnose him with "asthma-with-colds," meaning he's prone to having bronchial problems when he gets sick.