May 21: Pertussis

My son has had a nasty cough for about 2 weeks now. We were just in to see the doctor on Monday, but he seemed to have gotten progressively worse as the week went on. So, we figured it would be a good idea to get him back in. Our biggest concerns were ear infection, or, God forbid, pneumonia. A different doc at our pediatrician (there's 4 of them) had a look at him and she decided to start him on antibiotics...finally! However, her reason for the prescription was interesting. She suggested that perhaps, though the likelihood is extremely low, he might have pertussis; as I guess it's been going around. Now, I didn't know what pertussis was, even after she explained; something to do with a cough and the word "contagious" is one that I retained. Upon returning home, I looked it up and found that it is also known as whooping cough. Furthermore, it is "a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes uncontrollable, violent coughing. The coughing can make it hard to breathe. A deep "whooping" sound is often heard when the patient tries to take a breath." You can read more about it here. Well, that particular description did not sound anything at all like the cough my son has, so I'm thinking her "extremely low chance" synopsis is probably quite accurate; particularly since my son had the vaccine as a baby. Unfortunately, it takes about 7 days to get the lab results back, and the doc's theory was that by not starting antibiotics we're losing 7 days in which he could be healing, so to speak. While I'm very confident my son has some other virus that the antibiotics will hopefully knock out of him, we have to proceed with caution and basically quarantine him to home while he's on the 5-day treatment. Poor kid, it's bad enough his cough won't go away, now he's a prisoner in his own house. Whoever said it's no fun being sick when you're kid couldn't have been more right in this situation.