Sickie

Poor Mathias does not do well in the winters ever since he was born. It all started when he was just three weeks old and got bronchialitis (which is just a step below RSV) and we had to do breathing treatments. For the next couple of years we have had to do breathing treatments (Albuteral, which is a steroid, and Pulmicort, which is a preventative) all winter long and into the spring because anytime he would get a cold it would go straight to his lungs. A lot of this is asthma-related. We were told that he will most likely grow out of this. We thought that this was the year where he was starting to grow out of it because we have not had to deal with it all.... until January. We had made it almost a whole year without having to go to the doctor's, which for us is a miracle. We went a total of five times between January up to his 4-year well visit.


1. The first time we went was because he was complaining about his ear hurting. That is the one thing we have been lucky about. This kid has had EVERYTHING except an ear infection. Turns out he had a very little one that did not even require meds and we were told to just wait it out and if it gets worse, then we will do antibiotics.
2. The next time we went in was for a cough that was not going away. We were told to just start doing breathing treatments round the clock again. Luckily that helped for a bit.
3. We ended up going in again for a cold and some labored breathing and a really high fever . Usually we can take care of his labored breathing with the breathing treatments but it didn't seem to be going away. Also he had a fever of over 104 for a whole day. We would give him Tylenol or Motrin and it would go down for a few hours then shoot right back up. It turns out he had a bit of pneumonia in his left lung and a pretty good ear infection in one ear and a mild one in the other. He had also lost just over a pound in just over a week. He was not eating very much. Poor thing. We got some antibiotics that we had to give to him twice a day along with doing breathing treatments every 4 hours round the clock.
4. Our doctor had us come back just two days later to check on the pneumonia. She wanted to be extra cautious of it because of his asthma problems. She said that his lung was making some noises to where it sounded like his lung might have collapsed a bit due to the pneumonia and that it was pretty common. She told us to have him try and blow up balloons and at his next appointment, which was the next week, we would check it again.
5. This appointment was his 4-year well checkup and to also check out his lungs. It turned out everything was fine (thank heavens!) and we have not had any problems so far since (knock on wood).

(poor thing slept a lot for the first couple of days of being super sickie)

This was not a very fun month for us . Mathias and I just kept passing the sickies back and forth, although I think he got the worst of it. Also having to pay 5 co-pays for him alone in one month was not fun.