Getting Better

It’s been a week since Juliette fell ill, and she’s been a bit of a handful since. Luckily she’s getting better.

For the first 4 days she was coughing a lot in her sleep as well as having a very congested head. I could hear her trying to breathe through her stuffed-up nose during the night -but aside from trying to spray some saline into her nostrils to help clear the congestion there wasn’t a lot we could do. After the first day or so I refused to spray anything into her nose anymore because she would struggle like mad to escape our grip and shrieked her displeasure. Finally I started putting a spoonful of peppermint extract into a small teapot of boiling water and placed that under her highchair and in the bathroom when she had her bath – that seemed to help loosen up things.

The hardest part about this is knowing that every time she coughed it hurt her throat. She’d burst out into loud cries of pain all through the day and night after coughing. And at one point she was coughing in her sleep every 20-40 minutes, waking up to give feeble cries of pain before falling asleep again. It was heartbreaking, but also exhausting. Neither Becoming-A-Mom nor Becoming-A-Dad had much sleep over the Easter long weekend.

She had a rapidly-spiking fever which went on for the first 4 days as well – she’d be normal temperature then within an hour or so would get up to 38.5C-39C with little warning. We gave her baby Tylenol which would take an hour or so to bring the fever down again. And then within 4-5 hours she’d start getting up there again. It was a little scary but once we got into the routine of checking and giving her Tylenol things got better.
Now she’s still congested but not nearly as badly. Her nose is no longer running and raw (another point on contention she had with us – her nose was so sore she fought us off every time we tried to wipe away the snot). And she’s still coughing, but not nearly as often nor is it that deep reverberating cough she had in the beginning. Best of all she’s sleeping soundly through the night except for 1 or 2 wakings.

The bad part is that Becoming-A-Dad has caught her cold, and has been suffering from headache, cough, sore throat and stuffed nose as well. But I too am getting better.

I’m not so happy with my knowledge that this first little sickness is just the beginning…