All month long both kids have been fighting ear infections and junk. Most recently, Laura’s have started to act up. I thought at first that she was just saying her ears hurt because Warren has been getting so much attention for his. When he is teething, she will say her teeth hurt too. I have a hard time deciphering real complaints from attention wanting ones. On Friday, Feb. 18, Robert took Laura in for an appointment since she’d been complaining about her ears again. She was put on Augmentin. She did ok on it for a while, but then complained about her ears hurting again. Once again, I contributed it to wanting attention. We spent the 19th-23rd down at Mom and Dad’s. She was feeling rough the last two days we were there. I guessed it was to not sleeping well (neither of us did). Friday at daycare Laura started complaining about her ears hurting again. All day long she said it was her left ear and she started running a 100.3 fever. Thankfully she was able to spend the entire day there. We debated taking her in over he weekend to the doctor. She still had a 99-100 degree fever, but otherwise she acted fine. Monday morning of this week (the 27th) she woke up with a 103 fever. I knew then that I had to get her in. Thankfully we were able to get in with the pediatrician that we’ve seen before, and we like her.
At first, the doctor couldn’t see any cause for the fever and had no ideas. It was then that I saw a rash starting behind her ear. I figured it was from a constant fever. The doctor took a look and said that it wasn’t from the fever. It looked like it might be mastoiditis. It is caused by the ear infection spreading to the mastoid bone (right behind the ear). We ended up giving Laura some strong antibiotics via shots in her legs. We made a follow up appointment for Tuesday. When we got home, I started searching for mastoiditis on the internet. I made sure that the sites I looked at were reputable ones (WebMD for example). What I read scared me. I had to stop reading.
This morning Laura woke up and still had a 99 fever, but otherwise was acting fine. We had thought the appointment was made for 8:20 this morning. We got to the clinic, and it turns out the appointment had been made for Wednesday morning. We were able to get her in this afternoon with the same doctor as Monday. Laura was dancing, singing, being a happy girl. I figured we had turned the corner and were on the road to recovery. I had an eye appointment this evening. When I got home, Laura was in tears, pointing to the back of her head, and saying it hurt. I immediately looked behind her ear and saw the rash forming again. I picked Laura up and cuddled her on my lap. Just rocking a little bit, she started to doze off. She was also saying that she was cold, even though she had on long pants and long sleeve shirt and the house is at 68/69. I seriously considered taking her into the ER. I kept thinking about what I had read yesterday online about mastoiditis and what some of the complications can be from it. We decided to wait until the morning. I’ll call right away to get in. In the meantime, I’m trying to get my mind off it. Not the easiest thing to do. Yesterday my mommy senses (kind of like Spidey senses) were tingling telling me that this is going to get bad. I don’t know how bad it is going to get, but right now I am thinking that we could end up in the hospital for it. 