Nasty Illness

Sorry for the lack of blog updates. Natalie has had her first big illness of the year. She had a bit of a cough on a Tuesday night, but we had no idea what that was leading up to. She woke up Wednesday morning looking like this-



I of course took off work and thought it was just a bad cold. By around 4pm, I realized it was something much worse. I took her to the south express care. They warned me that it would be about a 3 hr wait, so we drove over to the north location. It was still almost a 2 hr wait. Natalie was miserable the entire time, just a rag doll in my arms. The dr tested her for RSV and said that she wanted to do a chest x-ray (the second one of Natalie's life)- the xray experience was as miserable as the last one...crushing as a mommy to have to helplessly experience with her)
Her RSV test came back positive, so we received a script to get a breathing treatment machine. I was told that she would be miserable for 3-5 days and I would have to miss that much work. Thankfully that included MLK day, so I only had to miss two more work days.
When we got home, Natalie continued to get worse. Her temp went up to 104, which prompted me to call the on-call doctor to check to see if we should take her to the ER (Her express care papers said yes) The on-call doctor was not very pleasant and stated that it was not needed. PawPaw and Maamma came over to help in the morning since I still had to go to work to set up two days worth of subs.
Natalie slooowwwly improved over the next several days, but unfortunately her high fever caused her to get a large cold sore on her upper lip (which I am still surprised and happy that it took this long before she got her second one)
And if that wasn't enough, on Sunday, when she was finally seeming to be getting a lot better, she suddenly woke up from her nap miserable! She just kept crying! I noticed that she was pulling at her ear a bit and we had been warned that RSV could lead to an ear infection, so we went back to express care and yep, she was diagnosed with an ear infection in her left ear. Thankfully that beautiful pink medicine clears it up quickly.
Finally after all of that excitement, she has been getting better. She is still on the meds for the ear infection and the scab from the cold sore is still healing, but thankfully she is back to her awesome and adorable self. Joel and I mentioned several times how thankful we are that we have a healthy lil girl. Just these small illnesses are so stressful and tiring, we cannot imagine what it must be like for parents with seriously ill children. We count our blessings every day!