Having coped amazingly well with being thick and heavy chested for a whole month without succumbing to an actual infection, i think Nora's immunity reserves finally ran out and she now has her first ever ear infection.
Of course, it's in the ear which regularly gets gummed up with enormous amounts of brown gunk (like her Dad).
She was awake crying half the night poor love, and McK manfully went and sat with her, fed her painkillers and so on, thinking it was a combo of sore throat and teeth. It was in fact ears, thhroat and teeth, in that order.
Apart from the tell tale wee brown spots this morning on her pillow, there was also the key area where she pointed to to say where it hurt. It was at the jaw, but about 1/2 an inch behind it. To someone who doesn't have ear infections (McK, weirdly, given his allergy hell) he might think she mis-pointed and was actually pointing to her jaw. Since the horrendous flu of 1999/2000 when my inner ears swelled to the size of eggs, and my throat wasn't so much red raw as covered in a rainbow of gruesome colours, my ears have never been the same and I know well how the spot just behind the jaw can become swollen, gunged up and very, very painful.
So she's at the Docs atm with Daddy. It's the good doc, who we know very well - but she's also *extremely conservative*. I suggested to her the idea of swapping Noo on to Goats milk for a while to see if there was any change, and she dismissed that out of hand as ridiculous quackery. Me, I'm... well firstly, I drink Goats milk myself because it reduces congestion and heartburn *in me*. I'm not suggesting that Nora has terrible food allergies and getting all whiffly in a Clapham mother type of way, I'm simply saying well look, let's give it a try. If it makes no diff, it makes no diff but I am buggered if I am going to solely rely on medicine to help her out here, when she self evidently has congestion issues and there *are* dietry changes you can make to reduce lung congestion.
So bearing that in mind, yesterday she started having Goats milk (and as I suspected, couldn't tell the bloody difference). Difficulty being that she woke up with the ear infection, which means she'll be on more antibiotics, so it'll be extremely difficult to tell which variable has a greater effect. Bah. Very annoying.
Meanwhile, one of my major tasks in the next few days is to look up everything I can about paediatric asthma and allergies that centre around the ENT organs.
Sigh.
Anyway, at least she ate plenty of breakfast, and cheered up once she'd had her Calpol and it'd sunk in. So she's not *horrendously* ill.
Ears, chest, throat, bloody athma; bloody allergies; bloody wet grim English weather. We need to go live in Botswana.
Posted by cait at March 7, 2006 11:28 AM