Baby boy has his first significant fever. It started on Friday and has veered between "Hmmm" and "Ye gods!" ever since. We've got him on a steady diet of fluids, Motrin, and Tylenol which seems to be keeping the awfulness at bay but there's still some weirdness causing alarm. He got his MMR, chicken pox, and flu shots two weeks ago but yesterday the injection site became raised and red, and is apparently quite sore. (The boy starts whimpering when we touch it.) We sent the doctor a picture of the rash and she seems relatively unconcerned, not that that relieves me. If it were two days after the shots I'd be cool, but two weeks? The brow furrows. His energy is good and he seems happy enough (even when edging towards 103) but boy, it's hard to relax when your kid is sick. How'd Prairie Mamas do it, with Doc twenty miles away and no acetamenophen? When I had heart surgery and was given a 50% chance of survival, my folks pulled through like champs but my kid gets a fever and I'm frothing at the mouth. Previous generations were definitely made of stronger stuff.
Anyway, we have to watch the boy this weekend and make sure he doesn't go downhill. He's pretty psyched because all this fever means he gets juice - a rare and coveted treat. I really ought to start exposing him to more "frothy" food. I don't want find him in huddled in the pantry, scooping brown sugar into his maw because we wouldn't allow Lucky Charms...
9 comments:
Two weeks later and discomfort does seem odd. I hate it when the kids have fevers. Particularly when that seems to be the only symptom. I would have made a terrible prairie mother.
Hope he gets better soon.
About 10 days after the MMR is when the real reaction starts. That's normal. Scary but normal. They should have warned you that that was the timing of the reaction and to expect high fever etc around that timing when he was given the shot. We just went through this a month ago, and were warned verbally and with handouts.
I was skeptical cos I had noticed with previous vacc my son's worst day was the day after. But they were all similar shots to each other and different from the 1yr ones. With this MMR one it was definitely 10days after (i thought he was grumpy about a week after, but that was nothing compared to what was to come)and lasted for several days of scarily (for me) high temps, also mouth pain when eating/drinking from the mumps affecting salivary glands, and a measles rash a few days after that. Then it all went away. Just a "normal" post-vacc reaction.
Of course get medical attention if the fever isn't responding etc, as usual, but it sounds like it is just the vacc and not something else he had picked up since then. The timing is right.
Oh and good luck and it should be over soon! LOL
Tor, you just made my day. We're on day 3 of scary temps and I was starting to sweat it. I'm pro-inoculation but when you see a reaction like this (one that you weren't warned about... Remind me to research new doctors...) you can't help thinking about those autism stories.
Oh good, I was worried I had become that annoying assvise person LOL. And seemed so um impersonal and lecturish in my comment when I read it after. (Hence me checking back to make sure I hadn't offended).
But that MMR reaction completely took me by surprise even with the warnings we got (which was from nurse run child vaccination clinic, so all they do is vacc day in, day out, traveling to a different place each day. So that's prolly why they have better system in place for warning parents etc).
I was on edge for days about if/when we should take him to the hospital (because it always seemed worse in the middle of the night, when ER is the only option), temping him constantly, panadol (like tylenol), trying to cool him with wet flannels etc (which he did NOT like). It was a real difficult couple of days. And like with you, he was happy and normal during the day, which was the one reassuring thing. If I hadn't know to connect it all to the vacc it would have been really scary. So I'm glad I could help a little by removing the "wtf is it?" fear, and leaving just the "lets deal with it" dramas. And hopefully you won't have to do that for much longer too.
And forget prairie mothers, how did our OWN mothers do it without the interwebs for info and support? Just trust their doc? how colonial!
God bless the internet. (By the way, I'm totally picturing trying to slap wet flannels on a grumpy toddler. It's not a pretty vision.)
I haven't given the MMR yet. I am a wuss. I am thinking of doing it in three different shots. He's already behind with language and I am totally afraid of autism EVEN though I KNOW it is not the cause. Especially if you just give him the MMR shot and nothing else at the same time. By the way, the flu shot is a crock. Doesn't work. Isn't real. They guess which strand of flu MAY happen that season, and it is almost always wrong.
I hear ya, Pursued. That MMR was a doozy. (Seriously, if Tor hadn't told me about the aftereffects I'd have lost my shit.) I don't know if they CAN break it up, though. I believe it only comes combined. With the flu shot I knew we were taking our chances but I figured that some protection was better than none. Even if they guess wrong, it tends to make the strain you do get less intense. (Of course it still kicked our asses when we caught it...)
Yeah I think the MMR is always combined now, but here they give the poor kiddos 2 other shots at the same time (I think different ones from you guys tho). If I ever have another kid I am going to get the MMR separate from the others. It was a doozy and why compound the trouble?
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