No rest for the weary

All I can say is - thank God for infant Tylenol drops! That's the only thing keeping me from crawling into a hole right now. Every four hours I get to give him Tylenol and for an hour sometime after that (sometimes right away, other times about an hour later) Cooper finally rests.

I feel terrible for him. He has a cold/virus - nasal congestion and swollen glands. Tylenol is the only safe medicine for this and we all know it doesn't cut it. He snorts and snores and cries and screams because he feels miserable from head to toe thanks to this dreadful cold AND his acid reflux which is still causing him pain.

Even though the Tylenol rid him of the fever, he was miserable all night and morning and he wouldn't eat without lots of coaxing. Once he would eat, it would come back up within minutes - including his Zantac dose which meant he'd suffer from the burning of the stomach acid when he would reflux during the day. We decided that the lack of eating and the spitting up of everything including his medicine, was reason enough to cart him to the doctor again to get looked over. Today we saw Dr.Jonathan - we'd met him at one of Cooper's first visits to the pediatrician when Cooper was just a couple weeks old. It's a good thing we did because we got permission to give him a higher dose of Tylenol and a slightly higher dose of his Prevacid (also for reflux). Dr.Jonathan told me not to bother wearing a mask around Cooper since he and I have the same cold and a mask isn't going to prevent passage of it back and forth. Oh, and he has lost 4 oz of body weight since Friday ;0.

On Wednesday Cooper goes back to the doctor to get his second dose of the Rotavirus vaccine. We want him to get it as soon as it is safe to do so since that virus runs rampant through schools and daycare centers and we now know how incredibly difficult it is to take care of a sick baby that is so young that he can't have most medicines available to treat older kids and adults with these illnesses.

Next Wednesday we take Cooper to a pediatric GI specialist for a consult. His pediatricians and we think it's time that we find out what exactly is going on in that little body of his. I don't know what will be involved in this visit - if it'll be just a talking consultation and external exam or if he'll also have an upper GI series - I'm thinking probably just a consultation and then any tests would have to be scheduled separately - just a guess. We feel terrible subjecting Cooper to all these procedures - but it's the only way to find out what's going on and how best to treat him to make him feel better.

I'm not getting much rest - in fact, I'm not getting any. It's so hard to take care of a sick baby while being sick yourself. Bob tries to help but Cooper mostly wants his mommy. That's sweet and all, but totally and utterly exhausting. I can't drop him off at daycare while he has symptoms of his cold - he has to be symptom-free for 24 hours. Although - I suspect some of the other parents are not as diligent in following the rules because there were a couple of snot-nosed babies there last week and I had a bad feeling about that but when I asked the teachers about those kids they said "its allergies" - yeah, and I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you at a great price too haha.

Let's hope this cold doesn't last long for either of us. When it rains, it pours.