So on Friday afternoon I get a call from my wife--our almost 7 year old is sick and needs picked up from school. I was already getting off of work early that day, so I left earlier and got her, took her to the Dr, and she has strep throat. "Not to worry," said the Dr, "it looks like we caught it early! It's barely registering on the test, but it is definitely positive."
So I fill her prescription and am told "After the first dosage, in a few hours she'll be feeling pretty good. In most kids' case, they feel 80% better after the first dosage, but the other 20% needs the full treatment".
We make a plan to more-or-less quarantine her from our 2 year old. On Saturday, my wife & I are doing some room re-arranging in the basement, eventually the 2-year old needs to come downstairs. We figure it was fine, the 7 year old's fever had not only broke (on Friday night), but had stayed down all morning and into the afternoon. We figure if she's not coughing on each other, or hugging and all that, that it will be fine.
4:30PM on Saturday, our 2-year old's head feels warmer than usual, and she's complaining saying "Oww...mouth hurt". So our only option is to take her to something called "The Little Clinic" inside our local Dillons Marketplace. The Nurse on duty is informed that her sister has strep, and because she's 2, they did not want to do the strep test. They looked at her throat and ears, and determined that those, coupled with the fever she definitely did have, that she also had strep.
We get her medicine filled, we give it to her, and we are hoping that we are done with this strep outbreak. We wake up on Sunday, we're wrapping up the room re-arranging (getting the 7 year old moved into her bigger room in the basement). We finally finish putting up our Christmas decor as well as putting ornaments on our Christmas trees (yes, that's plural, and yes we do it this early).
We depart for an evening of Christmas Light watching at a city-organized event, on the way there and home we notice our 2 year old's voice sounds weird, and she now has a cough...kind of like a seal barking. We initially thought that she was just in need of something to drink.
We all get home and get them in bed, and then the wife & I lay down to finish a movie we had started. We finish that movie and now I'm getting ready for bed when she hears the 2 year old coughing and it's even worse. She gets up and goes to check on her. She takes her temperature and it reads 104.2 degrees and now we're ****ing freaking out. Her temp had been 99 earlier in the day, but we didn't think much of it because we took it just after getting her up and out of her bed (and thus under covers), and considering it was 101.9 the day before, we thought "Oh, well the medicine is working in breaking her fever".
So we rushed her to the ER, and I'm freaking out because I'm thinking "Did she *NOT* have strep throat and we assumed it based on what the Little Clinic said???" and it doesn't help that the 2 year old is feeling so bad, and just wants to be held by her mom, that when my wife was trying to get things together, the 2 year old was so distraught that she wasn't being held that she now had trouble breathing.
The ER Doctor tells us that she has something I've never heard of, but apparently is common in babies/toddlers (specifically those who are 2 like our daughter): Croup. Apparently it is very treatable, they gave her a steroid that night to open up her breathing tubes (so that we wouldn't freak out anymore), but said she would still have that cough.
I've never been so ****ing scared in my life.
Ya it's not a very good look is it... But a deal is a deal and so here we are:
