And again… WTF ever….

We spent Sunday nite in the emergency room.

Seraphina, our lovely TreeFrog baby girl, had been feeling better as of my last post. We took her to the grocery store for a half-an-hour to get her out of the house for a bit(poor little thing was going stir crazy) and when we got home, I went to take her shoes off and I noticed her legs were puffy and a bit discolored, more so than just the redness from the hives. Kind of a purply grey. She went to go into the living room and she complained that her knees hurt. We tucked her in on the couch with her feet up and a cup of juice and she felt better in a little while. Then we all went and had a nap, and when we woke up, her legs were still swollen and she was crying about her knees and her feet and could hardly walk. She was even grinding her teeth from the pain.

Needless to say, we ended up at the ER. The ER physician shed lots of light on why our baby Frog has been such a sad baby lately.

To make a long story short, Sera’s hives were caused by an allergic reaction to amoxicillin. The doctor we saw on Friday gave her a new antibiotic to treat her ear infection, but it was a drug related to amoxicillin. So, even though she wasn’t taking the amoxicillin anymore, she was still reacting to this new antibiotic.

So she developed something called serum sickness, causing swelling of the limbs and severe joint pain. The doc put her on a new totally-unrelated-to-amoxicillin antibiotic, and also put her on prednisone to treat the hives and the swelling. He also told us to keep her on ibuprophen to help with the pain in her legs.

As of today she is back to normal. A bit wound up from the prednisone, but I’d rather have hyper-baby than sad-baby. So, hopefully our adventure in hives is at an end:-P

On a lighter, more proud-momma note-

She needed to have blood drawn at the ER. I told her that the nurse was going to have to poke her with a needle like Grandma pokes herself(my mom is diabetic) and that, while it might hurt or pinch a bit, it wouldn’t hurt bad and that it would help the doctor to make her better. When the nurse came in Sera was all business; holding her arm out, flexing her fist when he asked her to so he could find a vein, and she never even flinched when he stuck her. As he was packing his stuff up to go, she said in a very grown-up voice, "Thank you." He was shocked! He said as he left, "I get a lot of ‘something-else you’, but never ‘thank you’!"

(I suppose there aren’t many toddlers out there who don’t wail whenever they see a needle… I know it would have taken four people to hold me down when I was her age.)

She got two stuffed animals out of the hospital staff and a whole lot of wish-you-wells. I think my kid was a hit. One of the nurses even told me how awesome Sera is.

I wholeheartedly agree.