Week 162: Stick to the script

Well, what's new? What isn't?  Where to even begin...

I suppose it makes sense to begin with Wednesday. Things were looking pretty good. For the first time ever since both have been ex utero, both children slept uninterrupted in their own beds until after 6 a.m. I had forgotten what that kind of night felt like. It was incredible. I should have known that this miraculous event would be counterbalanced by some equally unprecedented but far less pleasant event. We made it through a pretty normal day, everything seemed deceptively fine. It was bed time, the kids were in their PJ's, and we were just about to begin actually getting people into beds. Lemon thought it would be funny to shuffle around in Papa Bear's slippers while carrying a basket. And it would have been funny, had he not tripped over the slippers, clung for dear life to the basket, and taken the entire weight of the fall on exactly one of his front teeth. Tears, blood, ice, phone calls to Nona (who, among her many secret superpowers was at one time a dental hygienist), etc. Long story short, no more front tooth.

I'd been vaguely meaning to find a dentist for Lemon, since he's about old enough, but I'd been putting it off "until things quieted down." This was sort of the opposite of "quieted down," but at least it forced my hand. We went to the dentist, who complimented Lemon on doing such a professional extraction job, taking out the whole root of the one tooth without even so much as chipping its neighbor, and told us to come back in a couple of months for a cleaning, once wound has had a chance to heal. And now Lemon will look like he's a pirate until sometime in 1st grade. Awesome!

The other thing we've been wrestling with is Something Sudden. When we left off last week, we were trying a round of levofloxacin to see if that could shake it. In short, the answer appears to be "no." Lemon is better than he was when Something Sudden first appeared, but is by no means fully well. He still has a pretty wet-sounding cough, which is not a great sign given that we've been on oral antibiotics for 10 days already. So, today, I got on the phone with the clinic to figure out a new plan.

In order for you to appreciate this story, I have to take a step back. At our last clinic visit, the nurse practitioner who has been seeing us recommended increasing the dose of levofloxacin that we get from 5mL per dose to 6, since Lemon has grown so much.  Fine. When I called in to the clinic 10 days ago to get our prescription, the doctor on call suggested using 5mL. I said that our nurse practitioner had recommended 6, he said 5 was fine and would have less GI side effects. Fine. We went with 5.

Fast forward to today. Our clinic calls me back to offer two alternatives: the first was to stick with levofloxacin, but go up from the 5mL/dose that we settled on 10 days ago to the 6mL dose that was recommended originally, or to switch to augmentin for two weeks and see how that goes. The nurse asked me what I preferred. How on earth am I supposed to have a preference? Isn't it the clinic's job to draw on their training and experience and make a recommendation? I ended up deciding to go with augmentin, because it seems to me that levofloxacin isn't working well enough, and I'm not sure that a 20% increase in dose will make the difference. So, we'll see what happens I suppose.

Just in case you imagined that the next week might be dull, Papa Bear left this morning at 5 a.m. for a one-week trip (his longest since either of the kids were born) and our morning nanny had surgery on her foot and is out of commission for at least the next few days. Fasten your seat belts...