I took my almost 13 year old daughter back to the doc again this morning.
She's had this cough since February. We saw the pediatrician when she first got it, and she got a chest x-ray...and declared that she had a viral infection and we should go home and wait it out. She had the start of a pneumonia, but the doc didn't seem to be too concerned, so off we went.
She's been coughing ever since. She's coughed hard enough to make herself throw up at times. I've called the doc back, and each time her nurse has said that because she's hasn't been running a fever that she's fine.
Yesterday I'd had enough, so I made her an appointment today and we went in to see a different doctor.
Afer they got her vitals, they tried to listen to her chest.
She had no breath sounds in the lower half of her lungs. She wasn't moving any air.
2 albuterol treatments later, they listened again. Now she had breath sounds...not perfect, but better.
The doc looked at her history, asked me and her a few questions, then said that she thought she'd probably had pertussis, but that she was going to treat it as a bacterial infection anyway. She'd give Shea a course of antibiotics, and then if she was no better after a week, she'd say that yes, it was pertussis and get a culture to get a definitive diagnosis.
Pertussis. That's whooping cough. Shea's been immunized against it......so she shouldn't be able to get it, right?
Wrong. The immunization wears off as kids get into adolescence, and in Shea's case..well, she might never have been immune to it. Sometimes the shots don't work.
That diagnosis would explain why no-one else in the house got sick. It would explain why it went on for so long with no significant fevers. It would explain why she coughed until she puked numerous times. It would explain a lot of things...
So, Shea's at home the rest of the day, she's on Zithromax, and she's on an albuterol inhaler 3 times a day until we hear back from the doc.
You know, parents are peddled these immunizations like they're some kind of panacea....like immunizing your child will make all the nasties of the world go away and they'll never get ill with any of the things they're being immunized against. That's not so......some kids are resistant, some immunizations wear off, leaving kids open to diseases that their parents never dreamed they'd get. They're not infallible, and I think that more parents should be made aware that they don't always work.
Nobody told me. I wish that they had.