So Sick of Sickness

I feel like my house is a petri dish. Well, not so much anymore now that my living room is piled with 6 loads of unfolded laundry and bedding ... and that I used pretty much an entire spray can of Lysol disinfectant in the past 24 hours ... and that I used two bottles of homemade essential oil disinfectants ... and that both children have antibiotics in them and are hopefully no longer contagious.

For the past month, we've cycled through viral infections, impetigo, colds, probably more viral infections and now strep throat. I've determined AJ and Teddy should really stay healthy because antibiotics don't seem to work so well for them. They both inherited my allergy to the penicillin family, which rules out a large number of drugs. Teddy reacted to the cephalexin from the impetigo. (Let's just say that what we were pretending was dry skin went away really quickly when he stopped that medication.) And we're hoping 3 out of 5 doses of azithromycin are enough to have wiped the strep out of AJ's system since apparently he develops a really cool itchy rash from that medication. Seriously, if they keep this up, they're not going to have any antibiotics available to them.

AJ was diagnosed with strep Friday evening (fun Friday night date!), so we began watching Teddy closely for fever or rash. Sunday afternoon he had a mild fever, so when he woke up with a fever of 98.8 Monday morning, that meant he went to the doctor instead of school. Turns out he did indeed catch his brother's strep (and then probably caught a cold and/or who knows what from the waiting room since he still feels the need to taste test inappropriate things).

I'm glad we took him in with such a minor fever because the diagnosis was confirmed. I feel like we should get a gold star for parenting a non-verbal child who can't tell us in a way we can understand that his throat hurts, that he doesn't feel good or that he's sick. We used to be overly paranoid with every fever but have gotten a bit more lax about minor ones where Tylenol or Ibuprofin do the trick because it's been so long since he's had a seizure. It's so hard to know, which is frustrating. Yet I talked to a mom whose daughter is tube fed, so she doesn't even get the potential warning from lack of appetite.

Who knows? Maybe Teddy had strep before AJ, and we just never caught it. Not that I want Teddy to have strep again ... but next time it'd be nice if he got the really distinctive rash AJ did. That might help us figure things out a bit sooner.