The WRONG Choice

Not sure if I have mentioned it on here, but Drew has had somewhere upwards of a billion ear infections.  Apparently there is a genetic component to them, so Drew, when you read this in 15 years, go thank your father.

Anyway, I've gotten good at noticing the "signs" for Drew.  Many kids pull on their ears and sleep terribly.  Not my son.  He just starts oozing green from his eyes and nose.  I was seeing all that last weekend when we were in Houston, so I took him to the doctor when we got home.  She said he had the very, very beginnings of an ear infection in one ear.  She prescribed an antibiotic (his 4th in 5 months), but said we may be able to treat the eyes and ears and hold off on the meds to let his body fight off this early, easy infection.  Sounded good to me.

And it looked like it was working.  His eyes cleared up and we didn't see any more snot.  I was pretty happy with my decision.  Saturday the kid slept until 8AM.  I sent up a silent prayer of thanks for letting him do that on a weekend before I went to get him..... and realized he was burning up.

He was pretty puny all day Saturday, but I knew we had a big problem when he sat on the couch with me for almost 2 hours watching the Preakness and didn't even move.  Then we moved to my bed, where we watched even more TV and snuggled.  Drew is NOT a snugly kid. I was thankful to have a prescription to fill to get this under control.

He didn't want to take a bath, but went down normally that night.  Rob went up to check on him, touched his cheek, and he was burning up.  We woke up Drew, took his temp, and it was 104.2 in his ear and 103.3 rectally.  I went to call the doc while Rob commenced sponging him off with cold water.

The nurse call line at Seton Hospital agreed that this was probably just the infection, and said we didn't need to go to the ER unless it got to 105.  By Sunday morning his fever had come down and he was acting happier, but he still didn't want to eat.  Then we had a repeat performance on Sunday afternoon and evening- lots of cartoons in bed and a 103.3 degree fever.  He isn't running a fever as a write this, so I'm hoping the antibiotics have had time to kick in and we might be winning the battle against the ear infection.

So I have learned not to mess with Drew's ears.  Even though I would like to keep him off medicine if at all possible, if there is ANY sign of an infection we are going to fill that prescription and start it ASAP. The last couple of days have been rough!