Then Thursday morning, he actually seemed worse, not better. He was coughing so hard that he was sort of hunching his back and sticking his tongue out with the effort of coughing, then gagging and ending the whole production with a very pathetic little cry that sounded very much like "what is happening to me?" As the morning wore on things continued to go downhill, to the point where he was refusing even to nurse and wouldn't open his eyes. I was thinking seriously about bringing him to the ER, since I was really concerned about how dehydrated he was getting, when he finally managed to take a break from coughing long enough to doze off. He slept for a couple of hours, and when he woke up he was almost miraculously better. He drank, ate, smiled, played, and generally seemed well on the road to recovery. His cough was still present but was drying up. By Friday evening Lemon seemed to be in quite good shape, still an occasional cough but nothing that made me worry, especially since he still had a full week of antibiotics left. Since we weren't as worried about Lemon any more, Papa Bear and I had the opportunity to realize that we weren't feeling so hot ourselves. At first we just chalked it up to the complete exhaustion resulting from caring for a sick baby, but by Saturday it was becoming apparent that more nefarious forces were at work. I made the executive therapeutic decision to have ice cream for dinner and go to bed at 8pm on Saturday night.
On Sunday morning, I was definitely not at 100% health but holding my own, while poor Papa Bear had a temperature of 102 and was so dehydrated when he got to the urgent care clinic that they wanted to run a liter of saline into him before letting him leave, and he had to swear up and down that he would rehydrate on his own before they would let him go without an IV. So, he came home and spent the remainder of the day horizontal on various surfaces around the house with regularly scheduled interruptions to take on more antibiotics and fluids. Meanwhile Nona came over so that I could partake of a little fitness therapy in the form of a 13 mile run. Not my fastest run ever by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it did help clear my lungs out since I think (knock on wood) that I escaped the worst of this little plague.
This morning the picture seemed, if not quite rosy, at least some paler shade of pink. Papa Bear's antibiotics were having the intended effect and he begrudgingly was admitting to feeling substantially better. Lemon's cough seemed perhaps a touch wetter than it had Sunday, but overall he was fine and happily sitting on the kitchen floor banging around with a spoon and a measuring cup when I left for work. Fast forward 8 hours, though, and we're right back in the thick of this thing. Lemon once again has that big, ugly, wet cough that makes him gag and cry, and a fever. His breathing is raspy and quick. To boot, the antibiotics have totally screwed up his already touchy digestive system so he has a terrible diaper rash. We called into the clinic, and the doctor on call gave us a new prescription for a different antibiotic, amoxicillin-clavulanate, which Papa Bear ran out and picked up so we could start it before Lemon went to bed this evening. We are all a bit frayed around the edges at this point and hoping that the new antibiotic works quickly and has longer-lasting good effects than the first one. Stay tuned and send chocolate...
