Emilia eating avocado

Video from last week, before she got her cold.
She eats pretty much anything I give her.
So far I have given her rice, butternut squash, apple, banana, and avocado.
I am going to try oatmeal and cantaloupe this week since she seems to feel a lot better now.
All that green mess on her face... it's cute because it's my own baby girl.

Still fighting her first cold

Emilia is still fighting the terrible cold. I am dreading this experience so much that I can't even imagine what I am going to do when she gets 5-6 colds a year as she gets older. We are trying all kinds of remedies to give her some relief from the stuffy nose. Saline drops/mist, aspirator, steam bath, humidifier... And I have even sucked the snot out of her nose with my mouth when the aspirator was not working too well. Sucking somebody's snot out with my mouth is something I never thought I would be able to do but of course Emilia is my own... an extension of myself.

Last night she started to have junky coughs which I think are from the post nasal drips. Yesterday evening we heard her wheezing after coughs and we started to notice (or imagine) she was breathing laboriously with her chest indrawn deeply.  We went to Sunnybrook emergency this time and the wait was definitely shorter (but they have no paediatric department there). Her oxygen saturation was at 100%... and the doctor reassured us that her chest sounded clear. 

Hopefully her coughs and breathing will be better tonight so she can get some sleep. She hasn't been able to get good sleep past few days because of congestion.

After 7 hours in ER

After 7 hours in ER and 3 pokes for blood cell count and blood culture, we have been discharged... though the culture result is still pending. It is unlikely that it will be positive according to the doctor. We are glad it is not meningitis or anything like that but I feel so bad that Emilia had to be held down and poked for almost an hour for the blood test. I don't know why her veins are so hard to find. I thought it would be better now that she is a big girl. We had to have three nurses try in her two arms and two legs.

An way the meningitis scare is over for now. We still don't know what the red spots are. Maybe just some burst capillaries..? Emilia is now fast asleep in the car. She is exhausted after the blood test. Poor baby. But I am so glad she doesn't need to be hospitalized and get poked more.

Here we are at SickKids Emergency

I noticed some purple spots on Emilia's legs inthe afternoon. They are not bumps... rather red/purple dots that look like tiny bruises. Then I suddenly remembered something I had read in the morning on the AboutKidsHealth website on the topic of fever. It said go see a doctor if the baby's fever is accompanied by purple dots that do not go away by pressing on them. We pressed on the dots... they did not disappear. I started worrying what the dots might be. Surpringly and unfortunately the website didn't say why we needed to see a doctor for the purple dots. That left me frantically searching on the internet... and I came across a condition called petechiae or petechial rash. Its cause was things like meningitis. Meningitis??? I tried to not overreact. After all, the internet is just overloaded with TOO MUCH information, much of which from unreliable sources. But I knew I would lose sleep over this however I tried to reassure myself. And our paediatrician was fully booked for today and tomorrow (the receptionist told me to go to an "after-hour clinic" which opens at 6 pm when I called her at 10 in the morning). What do first time parents do... except to take the baby to the busiest emergency for kids in the whole province. It has taken an hour to be assessed by a triage nurse. And it has been more than an hour since the 10 minute assessment. There are lots of families and their wailing babies and toddlers in this waiting room at this hour (2:40am). If not for the mysterious spots, we would not have come at all. We can wait as long as we need to... but I am just praying it's not a serious infection. It started as a simple cold and now I am worrying about meningitis... I feel so sorry for Emilia who had to be dragged out of home in the middle of night.

didn't survive the first winter without getting a cold

Just as I thought we made it through Emilia's first winter without getting sick, I came down with flu-like syptoms. And then, after days of wearing a mask at home and worrying that I might pass it to Emilia, she caught a cold today with a fever over 38'C in the arm pit. I am 100% convinced that she got it from me. Maybe it's because of the trip to Walmart yesterday. Whatever the cause, I blame myself and I will forever be damned if something serious develops because of this cold.

In the morning was a high fever with coughs but in the afternoon was a stuffy nose with a fever. Given her respiratory issues in the past, I feared her coughing more than having a congested nose. Alas I was wrong. She cannot nurse well because it is really hard to breathe while she is sucking. She is just too irritable now because she can't breathe easily or eat as much as she would like to.

Please please please Emilia get this over. I am sorry for getting sick and then making you get sick too.