Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Too much sickness!

It's hard to believe Jonah has been home a full month already!  The month has flown by in a rush of happiness coupled with a lot of sickness.

Jonah was started on antibiotics soon after he got home.  Unfortunately he passed a horrible case of strep throat on to me within his first days at home, and it took both a shot and a round of oral antibiotics to clear me up (I had a very high fever for days!), but not before other kids in the house ended up sick as well!  I thought we would never get everybody well!

Jonah finished his antibiotics without getting completely well, so he was put on another stronger antibiotic to help with the nasty infection in his nose.  Now he is on a 3rd antibiotic, and unfortunately it looks as though he will finish that one also without getting well.  He also has an antibacterial ointment I put in his nose to help with the infection there (a culture of his nose tested positive for staph infection and strep b - this is NOT the same strep that causes strep throat - see this article for an explanation http://www.livestrong.com/article/255715-causes-of-a-strep-b-infection/#page=1).  I bathe him multiple times a day to help clean junk out of his nose, and I use saline nose spray in his nose throughout the day.  However, his nose is just constantly full of green crud and blood.

As if Jonah's infections were not enough, nor the horrible case of strep throat I had combined with a bunch of other sick kids, Elianna ended up with MRSA in her eye.  He eye looked AWFUL!  For many days I was worried she would lose her vision in that eye.  Thankfully her doctor had done a culture to determine what was causing the infection so we were able to get her on some really strong antibiotics to fight it off.  She has been on an oral antibiotic as well as a topical ointment in her eye.  Getting her to take the antibiotic and let me put the ointment in her eye has not been fun but she is now much better (she would refuse any food or drink in which I tried to conceal the antibiotic, I finally found a really strong cherry juice that worked well to hide the medicine flavor).  I do still see some small signs of infection so I'm going to continue using the meds on her until we are positive it is all gone.

Needless to say although it has been a very happy month full of much joy and love it has also been a hard month dealing with so much sickness!

Her eye actually got much worse looking than this.  The white of her eye turned completely red, the area around her eye got horribly swollen and inflamed looking, she had tons of nasty goo draining from it, and she even had bloody tears.  It was really scary to see it get so bad, especially once we knew it was MRSA causing the infection!



My little buddy just can't get well!  His poor nose is just a mess!