They Can't Share Anything, But Sickness

My children are great at sharing with each other. One thing that is. Illness! Three out of the four children have been taken down by a cold within the last three weeks. And I wish I could say it was the oldest three, but the very oldest is the only one who is not sick. CJ started with a cold around the time I went into the hospital to have Alyssa. It quickly turned into a raging double ear infection for him which we thought we had cleared up with Amoxicillin. Kaitlyn started getting cold like symptoms shortly after that, but I didn't really think too much of it with her. However, last week when my 2 week old baby girl started sounding congested I began to worry. What if it's RSV? She's so little and there's nothing she can take. She continued eating fine, acting fine, and had no fever though.

Today though things seemed to take a turn for the worse. Actually, it started yesterday. She did not want to be put down. Then last night she was very restless and kept coughing pretty hard and it seemed like she was having a hard time catching her breath. CJ also ended up waking up complaining that his ear hurt during the night. So when he ended up sleeping for more than 12 hours last night and then woke up crabby and saying his ear still hurt I decided to call the doctor. I asked for both him and Alyssa to be seen because of her cough. Neither had a fever though. So off to the doctor we went and CJ still has his ear infection so his antibiotic was changed. What's worse is Alyssa has an ear infection too. So now she's on medicine and we have to watch her closely. If she gets a fever she's immediately going to the hospital. We have to monitor her breathing too. If it becomes difficult to breath we have to call the doctor.

CJ and Alyssa were the only ones we were actually being seen for, but I had all four children with me as it's February vacation. The doctor heard Asthmatic Kaitlyn's cough and did not like how it sounded so she put her on the schedule too. She heard wheezing and decided it was time to move her Asthma action plan into the danger zone. She is now taking a steroid for the next five days along with her albuterol treatment every four hours and her Singulair. So everyone is pretty sick here.

I'm most worried about Alyssa of course. My breastmilk should help her get over this, but for whatever reason it did not prevent her from getting an ear infection to begin with. Perhaps because I also have a cold. We will continue to breastfeed her and give her the antibiotic and just hope that her breathing remains fine and she does not get a fever so we can avoid the hospital. And our doctor will be calling to check up on her this weekend too which is nice that she does that. It was also great of her to check on Kaitlyn even though we weren't originally there for her.