RSV is the pits!

Harper modeling the latest in emergency room fashion


Yes, that's right. RSV as in Respiratory Syncytial Virus. Ugh!

Harps started off Wednesday just a little funky. She was pretty sluggish and she was having a bit of a "diva day". By Thursday, she sounded like an 80 year old smoker with a heavy cough and on Friday, we had a nose gushing with snot. After a couple of calls to Dr. McCray's office, we had Harper sleeping on an angle, a humidifier in the room and started her on Zyrtec. Through the weekend, she continued to get worse and by Sunday after church, she was wheezing and throwing up. Awesome.

I made a call to the on-call pediatrician to see if we could wait it out until we could get into Dr. McCray today. No such luck. With Harper's wheezing and throwing up, the on-call doc wanted the Squirrel checked out pretty quickly. Jared was scheduled to play golf with a client who was in town for a hotel show so I made the call to Honey and off to the ER we went.

Now if its been awhile since you've been to an ER, or even better a Children's ER, you can practically feel the germs sticking to you when you walk in the door. There we were, sitting amongst a crowd excellent for people watching, with antibacterial gel and wipes armed and ready. After two hours of waiting, we saw the doctor and Harper tested positive for RSV. We got home, stripped ourselves from every piece of clothing (due to the ER a.k.a. vat o' germs) and scrubbed down to get the germs off. Harps went down for the night around 7pm and then at 7:30pm, my daughter who rarely cries, wailed for two hours straight. M-I-S-E-R-A-B-L-E.

I got her in to see Dr. McCray today and turns out she's developed an ear infection as well - fantastic! We now have a barrage of supplies that are being shoved in her mouth, nose and ears, including but not limited to amoxicillin, acetaminophen, Boogie Wipes, electric nasal aspirator (if you don't have one of these and you have a baby, get one!), ear numbing drops, vitamins, saline spray, saline mist and Pedialyte.

And to top it off, since the Squirrel hit 3 months, I do a tooth check every day. Due to the recent sickness, I've withheld my finger from her gums. Wouldn't you know it that I scooped a little medicine dribbling down her chin back into her mouth
and, low and behold, there's a tooth coming through! No wonder she's so uncomfortable. You would be too if you had all of that going on at one time. I'm going to start carrying a piece of wood around my neck to have handy for knocking - Jared and I literally had a conversation on Tuesday about how lucky we'd been on her lack of getting sick, unrelated to belly issues.

I'm now reporting this after tonight's meltdown but I think we've numbed her up enough for the night that she can no longer feel her face. I'm hoping we'll start seeing some improvement over the next 24 hours since RSV is suppose to peak after 5 days. Fingers crossed!

And I'm a little late but I'd like to give a big "Welcome to the World!" to Tommy Musselman (congratulations Callie, JB and big brother Sunny) and August Berchelmann (congratulations Lauren, Stephen and big sister Gretchen)!