More Doctors Visits

This has been another sleep-deprived week around here. Ryder, just barely over hand foot & mouth disease, developed a cough on Saturday which quickly grew into a fever that wouldn't go away. Monday's visit to the doctor revealed that he had pneumonia. Pneumonia! That was a bit of a shock, honestly. No one in my family has ever had pneumonia, so it just wasn't what I was expecting. (I was expecting the usual, "Yup, it's a virus! It will go away in a few days. Call if it gets worse!" sort of news. The kind where you wonder why you bothered dragging your kid into the doctor's office at all.)

I guess we're fortunate that the doctor decided to do a chest x-ray, even though that was no fun to watch Ryder endure (for babies, they pull their arms as high above their head as possible and then buckle this huge plastic restraining thing all around them so they can't move at all. It's very effective and keeps them still for the x-ray, but Ryder screamed bloody murder the entire time. And then it was time to draw blood!).

The doctor started him on the strongest antibiotics right away, and by the next day he was already so much better. At his follow-up appointment the next day, the nurse took his temperature and it registered exactly at 98.6. I hadn't realized that I was pretty worried until I saw how relieved that number made me. I kept grinning stupidly and thinking, "What a beautiful temperature!" What a miracle those drugs are, huh? It's funny, because recently I've been reading a lot of stuff about how so many drugs are unnecessary and if people just ate more nutritious food we wouldn't need them so much. And that's probably very true. But for those times when you DO need drugs, I am very thankful for modern medicine! I'm also thankful that Craig called the doctor when Ryder's fever stayed so high. What if I would have decided to let it go for a few days???

Anyway. The important thing is that he's on the mend now.

The other important thing is the great Kendra-ism that came out of this. When the doctor arrived to look at Ryder, Kendra pointed at Ryder's nipples and mentioned off-handedly, "He could feed himself with those!" I've never seen a doctor try so hard not to laugh! He was even still laughing about it the next day!