Last Monday Ainsley developed a cough, by Thursday it was pretty bad. She was very congested and it rattled in her chest, stuffy, and had lost her voice, but never any fever. As much as I hate to hear her cry I wanted nothing more than for her voice to come back. So off to the doctor we go. Come to find out she got caught in the tail end of RSV season. For those of you who don't have children or your children are grown "Respiratory Syncytial Virus is a major cause of respiratory illness in young children. RSV causes infection of the lungs and breathing passages." We were sent home with a breathing machine as you can see from the photo above. She did very well with the breathing treatments and by Monday morning we thought we were good to go, so she went back to daycare. She still had a slight cough and runny nose, but nothing out of the ordinary and still never had a fever. Since she is so stopped up she has not been able to sleep flat in her crib for the past week, so she has had to sleep in her swing or her bouncy seat to keep her head elevated. Tuesday night she slept in her swing and Daniel fell asleep in the den with her. At 5:00am she woke up screaming and burning up. Her temperature was 102.5. We gave her some Tylenol and the fever broke, but the doctor said for her to come back in. I got to the office at 9:00am and they weighed Ainsley and she had dropped a few ounces, pricked her finger and found out her blood count was high, inserted a catheter to get clean urine, and by 10:00am we were on our way to get a chest x-ray. The x-ray showed that the RSV was not in her lungs and it is over with besides a little cough. The urine sample let us know she has a urinary tract infection (UTI)! She had to get a shot for that today and has to go back tomorrow to get another shot and then will be on some antibiotics. Unfortunately this is something that you can only try your best to prevent with ever diaper change and bath, but thank goodness for the high temperature because we would have just left it as part of the RSV and dealt with her being a little irritable and it would have just gotten worse. Needless to say we had a rough morning, but are on our way to recovery!
