Patches has been sick all weekend. Sick and mostly miserable. Patches is usually a pretty easy-going little fellow, but when he’s grumpy he gets into these moods where he screams no matter what I do. I hold him he fusses and wriggles. I put him down he screams and grabs my legs. I pick him up and he cries. I sit down he screams. I try to read him a story he knocks it out of my hands then he cries because the book is on the floor. I pick up the book and he knocks it out of my hands again. This behavior continues for an hour or more until he either consents to eat something or the tylenol has a chance to really kick in.
I much prefer the kind of sick where the child climbs into my lap and just snuggles. Patches did that once too. After he’d been snuggling for a few minutes he looked up at me and gave me a kiss on my cheek. An un-begged-for kiss from a child is a parent’s best reward. He gave me several kisses accompanied by looks that said “You’re a wonderful mommy. Thank you for taking care of me.” Right then I was so soft and melty inside that all the tantrums didn’t matter.
I took Patches to the doctor today. They confirmed my at-home diagnosis of Hand Foot and Mouth disease. If I’d held off for another 12 hours it would probably have been distinctive enough that I wouldn’t have felt the need to go in at all. HFM is one of those illnesses you just have to live through, like colds. So we’re in for a miserable week. One of these days I’ll start trusting my own judgement and stop dropping a $15 co-pay to have the doctor confirm what I’d already figured out for myself.
Pardon my medical ignorance, here, but what the heck is Hand Foot and Mouth disease? I thought that was something livestock got, or am I thinking of something else?
Foot and Mouth disease is in fact a livestock disease. It is completely different from human Hand Foot and Mouth disease despite the confusing colloquial names. The one Patches has is a viral infection which causes fever and sores in the mouth on the hands and on the feet, hence the name. Ugly and uncomfortable.
Intuition is good, but it’s sometimes the best thing to get it checked by a doctor anyway.
If nothing else, it helps to have things on record in case of complications later, and, well…
Okay, so I know of three deaths from “it’s just a flu” meningitus, so I’m a little parinoid, but yeah.
Here’s to hoping Patches recovers quickly – that’s a Not Fun bug, for both patient and parents. 🙁
I bet. I once had some sort of virus where I had sores in my mouth; I couldn’t eat, and could barely talk, without pain. I feel for the little guy. Hope he gets better soon.
Please be very careful with self-diagnosis
Ok so my case is an extreme case and I’m sure you’d never let a problem get this far in a million years, and God bless you for it, but just in case someone else might read this and be warned: My mother found out she had stage 4 (of 5 stages total) lung cancer that was inoperable, after not being able to walk the two blocks from our home to the doctor’s office without stopping to rest.
See, she’d been getting sick, and then better, sick, and then better, for months. Each time she’d self-diagnose herself with the flu or whatever and the well meaning doctors, knowing we were poor, would simply listen to her and prescribe her some medicine. For a little while she’d seem to get better.
I don’t know whether or not she’d be alive today if she’d been correctly diagnosed earlier. What I do know is that she would have loved the Internet, loved all the cool robotics that exist today, loved Schlock Mercenary, loved the Mars rovers, and most of all she would have loved my wife and especially my kids. She never got her revenge on me by spoiling my kids, which was her constant threat/promise.
Like I said I know my story is an extreme one, but to this day I’m very sensitive about self-diagnosis. (Pity my wife heh)