Sick Again

Aren't these germs a pretty shade of green?

I'm actually glad school is out. We get a few weeks with a break in the germ department. It's one of the only things I really hate about sending the Doodle to school because he comes home with everything imaginable. His medically fragile class room is like one giant petri dish full of sickness. The stuff he doesn't catch in his class room he catches from his brother who brings it home to share. The Doodle's immune system seems to be weak and he catches everything. 4 weeks of summer school starts in mid-June so he ought to he healthy enough to get back there so that he can catch something else. SIGH.

What do you do with a sick and coughing Doodle on a three day weekend? We finally caught a break in the weather but the Doodle is really sick. Fever. Cough. Runny nose. He's been coughing so hard he's come really close to throwing up. It's scary because when you have a child with seizures the last thing you want is for them to throw up their anti-seizure medication. What can you do if they do throw it up? You can't just re-dose them...

So this weekend has been a real bummer just knowing he's sick and not feeling good. You'd think being sick might slow him down a bit, maybe he wouldn't throw things out the front door as much. Nope. He's pretty committed to his obsessive compulsive checklist of chaos. The only thing he's backed off a little bit from is Doritos. I should note...he's only backed off the eating of the Doritos, not the dumping out of the Doritos.

Being sick you might imagine he would lay in bed and rest except he's not very good at being still. He's got to be exhausted because he's getting no sleep because of the coughing all night long. This morning he was up at 5:00am. He took a couple of cat naps but nothing solid. He's awake right now and I know I have my work cut out for me trying to get him to sleep. Every night is a battle unless he accidentally falls asleep by some weird alignment of the moon and the stars. I even gave him some Codeine cough syrup and that seemed to jack him up even more. Jim has been sleeping upstairs in Dominic's room and Jimmy's room so he can be well rested and fresh as a daisy in the morning.

Time to wrestle the 3 year old to sleep now. Wish me luck.

Meet the Sickies

Jimmy was sick a couple of weeks ago and still has a lingering cough.

The Doodle was sick a couple of weeks ago and hasn't been quite the same since.

Now, I am sick. Sick and tired. Sick and tired of being sick and tired. Could this be the H1N1? Could we have the Swine Flu? Hmmmm. Well, I can tell you this. You won't find out with a trip to the Doctor.

I went to the Doctor yesterday afternoon and gave them all of my symptoms: headache, chills, fever, aches, cough, sore throat, swollen lymph nodes...

I'm dying to know. Do I have it? Oh no. What if?

But, apparently, they don't test you to see unless they are going to hospitalize you. The doctor gave me a prescription for Tamiflu and sent me on my way. So now I don't know. Is this the flu or is it "the flu". Am I going to die? Did I just infect my entire family? Or did I catch this from Jimmy or the Doodle to begin with?

So many unanswered questions. Like, what is Jim eating to shield himself from all of this sickness? What kind of special vitamins or antibodies is he taking? Why the heck isn't he flat on his back with the rest of us?

So the Doodle woke up in a horrible little mood this morning and wanted nothing to do with the short bus when it got here. He clung to me like an acrylic sock in a dried load of laundry with no Bounce. He's sick. Again. My HUGEST worry when the Doodle gets sick is that he's going to get a fever that's going to trigger his seizures. The nurse left today because she's afraid of getting it too.

Last year the Doodle missed Halloween and trick or treating because of his broken leg. This year, the flu. To top it all off, today is Jimmy's real 10th birthday and I feel so bad that I am sick and not going to be able to take him out to dinner and a movie like he wanted. I missed the Halloween parade at his school and the party in classroom and I'm supposed to be a Room Mother. I had to send the drinks and goody bags with someone else.

It sucks being sick when you're a parent.

Thanks Kids

The gift from Jimmy's party that keeps giving...the flu. I'm pretty sure that's where I got it. So nice to have little kids in school. They bring home all kinds of wonderful things like colds, sore throats, head lice, the flu.

I just took a look at Jimmy's fingernails and they are disgusting. I can't even imagine the zillions of germs living under his fingernails. The fact that I have to wrestle him into the shower in order for him to take one is puzzling to me. Why don't 10 year old boys like to be clean or take showers?

So I spent most of the afternoon today laying in bed, trying to sleep in between chills, aches, pain and my fever.

Good times.

Poor little guy

Doodle Bug is still not feeling good. Cold. Runny Nose. Cough.

I will be keeping him home from school tomorrow and he doesn't get to walk

the garbage down the road with the Boys tonight.

A Shot in the Dark

We've been so lucky. The Doodle has only been sick once since last February when he had his tonsils and adenoids removed. Prior to the surgery, he was always sick...cough, sore throat, runny nose. He was on so many antibiotics as a baby I thought for sure his body became immune to them and they just weren't working.

The Doodle came home sick from school today. Preschool is great but this is the first time he's been out and around any other kids besides Jimmy. Now he is touching and breathing millions of new germs 4 days a week. It's so irritating to me that parents send their children to school sick. There should be a fine for parents who send their kids to school like that. They should be called back to school to pick them up, but first stoned and lambasted in the quad and it filmed so that it can be put on Youtube.

When the Doodle gets sick, the seizure activity goes up. In our house, fevers = seizures in our already seizure prone child. The problem with seizures is that they feed off themselves, the more seizures your brain has, the more it's going to have. They multiply like spores and they mirror each other. So if you start with seizures on one side of the brain, the other side begins to copy it and then you have a chain reaction. I'm crossing my fingers and saying prayers that this cold or flu does not trigger the seizures to start back up again--Because we seemed to have finally gotten them under control for now, through medicine, luck, prayer or some kind of anti-seizure miracle.

So even with washing the hands and spraying large amounts of this:

And wiping things down with these

He's still sick. Cough, runny nose, dark circles, sleeplessness, low grade fever. Actually, both boys are sick. Which means, we're (Jim and I) probably going to get it. I wish I could send the Doodle to school in one of these:

I could spray it down with Lysol before he left for school and it might help. It would serve another purpose by protecting him in case of a seizure too. My little Epileptic Knight in Shining Armour.

I'm listening to and reading about so many different reports and perspectives on whether to get a flu shot or not. Personally, I've never ever had one. Beside hating shots, I could not fathom purposely injecting myself with a flu virus to fight the flu virus. I know there is a method to the madness and this is supposed to work but I still can't wrap my tiny brain around it. What bothers me is how do they know which Flu virus is going to be coming around each year ahead of time in order to inject you with the right one? I get it if they have a vaccination for the Swine Flu H1N1 but if they are just injecting with you a best guess for the flu in general, I think it's a little risky. What are the odds you are going to get THAT flu? And I hear that so many people get sick right after getting the flu shot anyway.

Vaccinating the Doodle is a hard subject for me. He has had almost all of his vaccinations. But, I stopped vaccinating him after he began having seizures last January. I just could not put another potentially harmful toxin into his already sick little body and give his brain one more thing to process and his weak little body something new to deal with. I have been listening intently and reading profusely about the subject of vaccinating. Jimmy had all of his vaccinations...no questions asked. Yes, I can't help but feel that not all kids are created with the same immune system and equipped to handle the same dose and amount of injections. It scares the hell out me. At this point, for me, I think vaccinations are a shot in the dark.