Our visit from Spot

I did so well about writing last month and here it is the LAST day of March and I'm barely squeezing in an entry for the month. It's funny I've kept thinking I just had to get on here and change my background from the snow theme to something more springy to match the weather but now all the snow has kept coming back right here at the end. How frustrating! Maybe changing my background will bring better luck in that area. =)

Okay, so I wanted to write about this and never did but I'm doing it now. It was last month when I took Alex for his 1yr well child visit that the pediatrician told me he had 2 ear infections! He'd never had an ear infection before, at least that I knew of, and it made me feel bad that he was probably in pain and was just being tough and didn't let me know while he was suffering through it! The doctor prescribed Amoxicillin and Alex took it for 8 days straight without any problems. Then on the morning of what would've been his 9th day of taking it, he woke up looking like this:

I know I'm horrible but I didn't even notice at first. I changed his diaper and everything and must have still been half asleep because it wasn't until Joe picked him up that he said something about him having bumps all over him and we realized he had a mild rash all over his body. We called his pediatrician and they said to stop taking the Amoxicillin and recommended that I take him in to be seen. He'd also eaten cauliflower the night before for the first time and Joe is allergic to it so I thought maybe it was a food allergy since he'd been taken the medicine for 8 days with no symptoms at all. The doctor couldn't tell me what the reaction was from but said it was definitely hives and said I could give him Benadryl and a pain reliever. The ear infections were gone, thank goodness, so he didn't need anymore antibiotic.

That night when I was getting him ready for bed the hives seemed to have gotten worse and he looked like this:

The next morning was Saturday and this is what he looked like when he woke up. You could tell he just wasn't feeling good:

This was taken 2 hours later in his car seat. At this point we came up with the nickname "Spot" because he sure didn't even look like our little Alex anymore:

Again, two hours later. You can notice the hives on his face are growing and getting closer together so it started just looking like a really bad sunburn all over his skin:


And this is him in the bathtub that 2nd night, only 36 hrs after first noticing any sign of hives:

After getting him out of the bathtub I got him dressed and gave him medicine and he started feeling a little better. He and the girls were playing 'store' in the kitchen and eating animal crackers and I was glad to see him feeling better and playing! This picture made me laugh:

The next morning, on Sunday, he woke up with a pretty high fever at about 8am and was really fussy and not sleeping well so I took him to an InstaCare. Come to find out he had gotten tonsillitis and had ear infections in both ears again! They said the tonsillitis is a viral infection so it was unrelated, just unlucky timing, and the ear infections were a result of that. Poor kid! They didn't prescribe him another antibiotic because they wanted to wait until the hives were all cleared up but they gave me some numbing drops to put in his ears so at least they wouldn't hurt. None of us went to church because tonsillitis is contagious and that afternoon Alex was playing with his sisters a lot and seemed to be feeling a ton better.

By that night in the bathtub you could tell a big improvement with the hives. They at least were starting to not be so red and it looked like they were soaking back into his skin. He was obviously feeling so much better!

What an adventurous couple of days those were! It took about 3 days after this for any sign of the hives to be gone, but it was just those first 3 days that were the worst. By the way, I was told this was definitely a drug related reaction, and wasn't caused by food. Yippee, Alex, you get to have cauliflower again!