Friday, January 02, 2009

Further on Marcus

Well, my "Marcus is doing better" post was a bit premature. His temperature never really went down and by yesterday he was as white as a ghost, totally lethargic and had a temperature of 38.1C (100.6F). He also hadn't eaten anything for the last three days and he's so skinny that he doesn't exactly have any weight to spare.

Mum and Dad are up for a few days and by the time they arrived about 3pm, he was definitely not improving. Mum immediately started covering him in cold towels (something I'm embarrassed to admit hadn't occurred to me) and even that didn't really help, so we took him to the doctor. Of course, it was New Year's Day, so we had to take him to an emergency doctor rather than our own GP, but it couldn't be helped.

She took one look at him and agreed he was a sick little boy. His temperature was the same and after she had listened to his chest, checked his throat and his ears, she announced that he had an infection in all of them, the worst being the chest infection. We needed to get some paracetamol into him to bring down the temperature and start giving him oral antibiotics. If we couldn't do that he'd have to go to hospital.

I hadn't realised he was that sick, so it was a bit of a shock to realise things were that bad.

The medicine taking didn't go all that well in the afternoon and he threw up the first dose of antibiotics. He fell asleep about 7pm last night, but when I went in to check on him a couple of hours later, he was so hot I took his temperature again. This time is was 38.8C (101.8F). I woke him up, covered him in some more cold cloths and gave him more pamol.

Thankfully, the fever broke overnight and while he's certainly not himself today, he is much, much better. The antibiotics are staying down and when we took him back to the doctor for a follow up visit, she was much happier with him. Now we just have to keep giving him the medicine and he'll come right.

It hasn't helped that it's hot (about 27C or 80F) and humid at the moment. I'm sure that doesn't help when you're all infected and feverish.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Poor little guy; hope he gets better soon. When my kids are sick (not raging infections though, just fevers with typical illnesses) something that usually stays down and helps cool them down are lemonade iceblocks.

He must feel terrible in this heat too. :(

Erin (moviemuse) said...

Oh, there is nothing worse than a fever in hot weather! I'm so sorry he's not feeling well. Get well quickly, Marcus!

Kerry said...

Thanks, Jenny.

We've tried iceblocks. I managed to get him to eat a bit of icecream for lunch, but he must be one of the few kids you have to bully to eat icecream!

He is steadily improving, so the worst is definitely over.