The flu

On Monday, when Rebecca woke up from her afternoon nap, just after Ramy and I got home from work, we thought that Rebecca felt hot.  Sure enough, she had a 99.9°F temperature.  Nanny Rebecca had told us that she'd had a great day at the park, playing and having a picnic.  We just watched it, and she got a bit cooler before bed and was cool when she woke up on Tuesday morning.  However, by lunchtime on Tuesday, her fever went above 100°, was 101.8° within the next 15 minutes, and while I was on hold with the pediatrician's office to get an appointment, climbed to 103° despite a dose of acetaminophen in the meantime.  Nanny Rebecca met me with her in Colton so that I could take her to visit Dr. Jeng.  He listened carefully to her lungs and looked carefully at her ears and throat and was confident that she had influenza (not H1N1).  Dr. Jeng's observation was that there seemed to not be a very good match between this year's season flu vaccine and what people were coming in with. 

I told him that Rebecca and I were scheduled to take a red-eye across the county the following evening.  He said she would be fine to travel and would not be contagious by that point.  He felt confident that with the Tamiflu he was prescribing, she'd be fine and dandy quite soon.  I had a little adventure as an amateur pharmacist because of the horribleness that was the attempt to put the contents of the Tamiflu capsules into ice cream to get Rebecca to take it.  My work to put it into a suspension of simple syrup and adding it to her favorite juice worked well enough to get her first couple of doses into her, and then I was able to get them to call in a new script for it into our local compounding pharmacy who put it into a true suspension. True to form, she perked up pretty quickly and was her usual wonderful traveling self.  She would start running a fever and you could tell she felt wretched when her ibuprofen would wear off, but 20 minutes after a new dose and she was playing and talking.  She still looked quite pale and really had no appetite at all until the weekend.  On Saturday, she was definitely feeling good and on Sunday, she was feeling GREAT.  I think having undivided Grammy attention and concentrated snuggle time made her get well super-fast. 

Knock on wood, neither Ramy nor I or Nanny Rebecca have come down with it.  Hopefully we'll all stay well through the rest of flu season!