Swine Flu????

Believe it or not we may have a case of swine flu right here in our house.  It all began when Grant woke up on Thursday morning running a fever of 101 and he was coughing and sneezing.  Luckily Jeff was in town this week so he stayed home with him.  When I called his school to let them know he would be absent they asked what his symptoms were and then told me I needed to call our family doctor and get him in because all of his symptoms were conducive with the H1N1 virus.

Jeff loaded him up and took him to see Dr. Scott.  After a negative strep test he said that Grant most likely just had a virus and told us to give him Mucinex to break up the congestion in his chest, over the counter cough medicine and Tylenol to keep his fever reduced.  We did that all day on Thursday and he woke up on Friday morning fever free and hardly coughing so I went ahead and sent him to school.  Now that I look back that probably wasn’t the best idea.

After school on Friday he was coughing quite a bit when he got to my classroom and it continued to worsen throughout the evening.  He also began running a low grade fever again.  With the help of Robitussin and Mucinex he finally fell asleep around 12:30 am and got a good nights rest.  He woke up this morning saying he felt great but I could tell in his eyes that he wasn’t 100% yet. 

There’s one more part to this story that I haven’t shared yet.  Grant’s birthday is on Monday and we had a camp out party planned for tonight in the backyard with 7 of his friends.  He knew that if he wasn’t feeling better that we wouldn’t be able to do the party.  After looking at the forecast this morning, which called for rain all evening and night, and seeing how puny he was Jeff and I made an executive decision to cancel the camp out and just have the kids over for a bbq and ice cream sundaes like we had planned and then take them all to see a movie and then home.  That way Grant wouldn’t have late night and he would still get to celebrate with his friends. 

So started the task of calling everyone to tell them the new plan.  After 3 calls I spoke with Nick’s dad, who is a doctor in the same office as our family physician, and he explained to me that Grant most likely has the H1N1 virus.  There are so many cases now that the state is no longer even sending swabs to the offices to be done on patients.  As long as the patient is not running a 102 fever and having chest pain with their cough there is nothing that they are doing other than the course of treatment that we are doing on Grant.  He also told me that his two nephews who were in town last weekend were given a probable diagnosis with the virus earlier this week (although they were not swabbed either) and since Grant was with them last weekend he had probably been exposed. 

After hearing all of this news Jeff and I decided that even though Grant would be upset it wasn’t a good idea to have all of the kids around Grant.  Plus, what parent would want to expose their child to swine flu???   So we ended up postponing the party for tonight and we will try again in a few weeks.  Hopefully by then this nasty virus will have run its course and Grant will be able to enjoy his birthday party.

He’s obviously been watching the news lately because he’s pretty sure he needs to wear a mask so he doesn’t get anyone else sick.  I picked him up a package of these while I was at Wal-Mart today.

We feel awful about him missing out on all the birthday fun he was expecting tonight so we let him open one of his gifts a little early.     

 

It’s a new padded NERF case for his DS.  I was shocked at how excited he was!!!