Unexpected Doctor Visit

This is a little late on news, but oh well.

Jilly had her first "sick baby" doctor appointment last week (not bad for being over a year old). Back in November, I got a cold. After a couple days, I gave it to Jilly. Since then she's had this super runny nose and a cough. She doesn't cough often, but when she does it sounds bad. Last Wednesday night, she had a rough rough night. She woke up crying and crying. I got up and spent 45 minutes with her, trying to calm her down, but nothing was working. By this time, I was upset, so I woke Steve up to see if he could get her to calm down. Sure enough, Daddy had the touch. She took a bottle from him, was soothed and went back to sleep. Of course, the same thing repeated itself just a couple hours later. Oh joy.

I was concerned at this point because of the length of the cold, her rough night, and a yeasty diaper rash she'd had for a couple weeks as well. I called the nurse at our clinic to see if it was important enough to bring her in. The nurse was worried it was an ear infection, so we decided better safe than sorry, and brought her in Friday morning for a checkup with Dr. Cronyn. (Side note: we got to weigh Jilly and she is 21 1/2 lbs!) Dr. Cronyn came in and checked Jilly over, while asking me some questions. She hadn't had a fever, that I'd ever noticed, hadn't been acting sick really, but just had these couple things that wouldn't go away. Jilly was pretty well behaved, didn't freak out at Dr. Cronyn, but wanted to hold all the instruments herself, so I had to hold her still when her ears and nose were checked. Turns out her left eardrum was bright red! It was an ear infection! Both the doctor and I were surprised because we would have expected ear pulling and other signs of discomfort, and there were none. So we started a round of amoxicillin, the same pink syrup I used as a kid.

I was sad that Jilly had an ear infection, but glad we were able to diagnose it and get it treated. Even though we didn't see the classic signs of ear infection, that (hopefully) means she wasn't suffering too bad. So I guess if you gotta be sick, that's the way to go. ;-) We also got some good cream for her diaper rash.

It's now been a week and her rash is pretty much gone. She's still having some struggles with the ear infection. Jilly has been sleepier than normal (though I'm not complaining) and waking up during the night (I'll complain about that one). We'll see Dr. Cronyn in a couple weeks to make sure everything is resolved. But there are lots of good things about this all: a) we have insurance that was able to cover (most of) the cost of the visit and medicine, b) she had a treatable condition that was easily diagnosed, c) she didn't seem to be suffering much, even though she was sick, and d) she doesn't mind taking her medicine, although it's cold! Let's hope she gets better fast and this does not become a recurring story for us.