You can tell the school year is almost over. Miles is wearing two different shoes, Oliver has black pants instead of navy, and you can almost see Linus’s toes through his shoes. But by god, we are almost to the end of third grade!
Aw, a year ago was the 100th monthly pic, which I planned for so long, but didn’t exactly turn out as amazing as I’d hoped. Mostly because of socks. Oh well. 200 will be better.
This has been a terrible year for sickness. I don’t know why. I thought the boys got all the sicknesses out of their systems when they were younger. We had a great run of it for a few years, but this year has been constant. There was the coughing and asthma from the fall that lasted three weeks, then the barfing in the winter, and now this.
“This” is Whooping Cough. Wait, what year is it? 1938? No, it’s 2017, my kids are fully vaccinated, and they were diagnosed the other day with pertussis, more commonly known as Whooping Cough.
Well, I say “they.” Not really. But let me go back to the beginning…
February 28, Mardi Gras day: I took Oliver to a parade, but George called me because Miles had a fever. We headed home and I took Miles to Urgent Care, where he tested negative for strep (which was my guess) but was given a z-pack (azithromycin) anyway. The doctor thought it was some kind of throat infection.
Infecting the whole Smoothie King Arena at the twenty one pilots concert!
March 5: Oliver has been coughing a little bit, but it’s not terrible, and I go to Australia/New Zealand.
March 15: I arrive home, and Oliver is still coughing.
March 16: I get a call from the school nurse. Need to pick up someone (I can’t keep track) because of coughing.
March 17: I get a call from the school nurse. Need to pick up someone (I can’t keep track) because of coughing.
Spreading disease at the Aquarium!
March 20: I get a call from the school nurse. Need to pick up someone (I can’t keep track) because of coughing.
Ha ha ha ha ha yeah like that was gonna help.
March 21: I get a call from the school nurse. Need to pick up someone (I can’t keep track) because of coughing. I take Oliver to the pediatrician because his cough is not getting better. But he’s showing no other symptoms. He had a very mild (like 99 degrees) fever, though. The doctor suggests maybe it’s a post-nasal drip from a sinus infection, so she prescribes a z-pack.
March 22: I have to work at a conference in town, so George stays home with all three kids.
March 23: The boys go back to school, and that afternoon I triumphantly post on FB that I didn’t have to pick up anyone from school! My triumph is short-lived, though.
March 24: I get a call from the school nurse. Need to pick up all three because of coughing.
March 27: Me and the school nurse are buddies by now. But the kind of buddies you dread hearing from. I really do like her. But I hate it when she calls. When I go pick up Oliver, she says, “this is going to sound crazy, but it might be Whooping Cough.” I poo-poo the idea. He’s vaccinated, after all!
March 28: I volunteer as a chaperone for a field trip in Miles’s class. This way I know I can give cough syrup midday to all three, so maybe we can make it through an entire day again! I dose up Miles and Oliver, but when I get to Linus’s classroom, he’s already been sent to the nurse’s office. Sigh. I take all three home.
March 29: I keep all three home from school. WHAT’S THE POINT? Meanwhile, I desperately make an appointment with the pediatrician, who agrees it can’t hurt to test them for pertussis. That afternoon, we head to Children’s Hospital to get the test. It involves shoving a thin tube up the boys’ noses after squirting saline up there. There is a surprising amount of laughter while they have it done, even though it’s definitely not pleasant.
At the doctor’s office. Notable because they’re reading!Waiting to get a tube shoved up their noses.
That evening, I get a call from the doctor. “Are you sitting down?” she asks. “Linus tested positive for Whooping Cough. The other two were negative for that, but positive for rhinovirus.” (Which is just a cold.) Dr. Google had already told me that the treatment for pertussis is a course of antibiotics. As it happens, a z-pack. We realize that must be why Oliver tested negative – he had a z-pack the week before!
But what about Miles? We were going to have this in our house forever. Do you know pertussis is called the “100 day cough”? Yeah, I believe it.
But then it hit me – Miles did get antibiotics, for the mysterious illness he had on Mardi Gras day! It’s only a theory, of course, but it makes sense…Miles was Patient Zero! We got, dare I say, lucky, that we treated him unknowingly. And correctly. Never have I been so glad that the boys have a penicillin allergy! Z-packs FTW! And Miles finished his antibiotics before he went back to school after Mardi Gras break, so at that point he was no longer contagious.
So here it is, March 31. Linus is on antibiotics. I am on antibiotics (preventative.) I sent Oliver to school this morning because he seemed to be feeling okay. (And is no longer contagious as he finished his z-pack already.) But right on schedule…
I get a call from the school nurse. Need to pick up someone (I can’t keep track) Oliver because of coughing.
When I go to pick him up, the nurse’s office is filled with third graders. Earlier today, I got a call from the state Department of Health about the whole situation. I’m really glad they’re tracking it and everything. But it really hit home when I got to school to pick up Oliver. Every parent of a coughing third grader was getting a phone call with a recommendation to start antibiotics. If they weren’t vaccinated, they have to stay out of school for 21 days.
A little while ago, a letter went out to the whole school saying there’s an outbreak of Whooping Cough in the third grade. Ugh. We’re not named in the letter but it’s obviously not a secret since I’m blogging about it.
I feel irrationally terrible. I know it’s not our fault. We had no idea. We don’t know where we got it from. We vaccinate our kids. We get vaccines ourselves. Who would have thought we’d come down with some preventable disease? But we have friends with small children. The boys were at school all month with this. They’ve been in public. They’ve played with friends. We went to a one year old’s birthday party!
We may have weeks of coughing ahead of us. It’s “only” been four weeks. We could have another month of this.
Linus is staying brown (well, -ish. As close as I could get, anyway. There’s still a greenish blue tinge that isn’t not kind of neat.) But Oliver wanted his purple back.
And then Miles wanted me to figure out this specific hairdo. (Did I mention I also cut his hair? Go me!)
Who said you need little girls to have fun with your kids’ hair? (I mean, hopefully no one actually said that.)
So, where were we? Thursday morning, I suppose. It was our last day in London all together, as George had plans to go to Canterbury on Friday and meet up with a friend. Linus wanted to go to a castle, so we toyed with the idea of going to Windsor Castle, but getting there and back would have taken up too much of the day, so we decided to hit Hampton Court Palace instead.
On the tube
On the train
It was only about half an hour by train, so not bad.
Wednesday morning, the boys and I caught the train to Cambridge. I was nervous about the journey because I had three boys and two suitcases to deal with and we had to not just switch trains in London, but switch stations by way of the Underground. But not to leave you in too much suspense…it was fine. (George’s journey the next day, by contrast, did not go so swimmingly, but that’s not my story to tell.)
Rachel (Gareth’s sister) picked us up at the train station and we headed to a shopping center to meet up with her boys (Dan, 13, and Ethan, 9) and Pat, their grandmother. The boys were so excited to see Dan and Ethan, and it was really cute when they saw each other and were all shy for about 12 seconds. (You might remember, they visited New Orleans back in May and the boys became fast friends.)
A real British mall! Looks….just like an America mall.
The streets of Cambridge all decked out for the holidays
Pretty!
The boys at the cricket/dragon/cockroach clock
We were going to be experiencing something extremely British that evening – a panto! Before showtime, we wandered a bit around Cambridge, getting a snack and seeing some of the sights.
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