Alex has got another chest infection. He wasn’t feeling too good last week, and had a spot of diarrhoea and vomiting. (Scott and Ange were babysitting on Friday evening, and unfortunately they got to experience both!) The slight cough he had earlier in the week sank into his chest, and developed into a full-blown hackfest. His little face would contort in pain every time he coughed or sneezed, and he was suffering quite badly.
He hit the worst of it on Saturday night. We clocked his fever at 39°C, and he tossed, turned and twitched the whole night through, waking himself up and crying whenever a cough hit him. So on Sunday we called the doctor, and Alex and I went in to the health centre in the afternoon. As we’d expected (the experience is getting to be a familiar one) the diagnosis was a bronchial infection.
Interestingly, though, in addition to antibiotics the doc also prescribed him an asthma-type inhaler. He’s too young to use the inhaler on its own, so there’s a weird plastic mask contraption we put over his mouth and nose to give him the full benefit of the drug (salbutamol). Even though Alex doesn’t have asthma, the drug just opens up his airways to let him breathe a bit more easily. We’ve only used it a couple of times so far, just after particularly bad coughing fits, and it seemed to reduce the wheezing for a while.
Alex is feeling a lot better today, though. The fever is gone, and he is in nursery as normal. The cough still looks like it hurts for him, though, but the antibiotics should clear that up soon.
(It’s so hard to see him in that kind of pain. I sympathise a lot with him on this because I get a lot of chest infections myself, and I know exactly how painful it is when the infection gets to that stage. Poor little bunny!)
