This is pretty irrelevant for most everyone, but I’ve told this story like 50 times the past 24 hours and I wanted to write it all down.
Mallory has whooping cough, also known as pertussis. That’s the point of the story, but not the whole story. Let’s back up about six weeks.
We were in Lake Placid for Rick’s race and we ran out of Singulair, an allergy/asthma treatment pill that the kids are supposed to take every night but really only in the winter. So I didn’t worry about refilling it and figured it would be a good test to see how they’d do without it. Mallory started with a very mild – almost unremarkable cough while we were on our trip, but with my kids’ history of asthma, and my history of allergies, I didn’t think twice about it.
Two weekends ago, Mallory’s cough changed – it sounded more “real” or something, I can’t remember exactly, but it was enough that it made me want her to be seen by her doctor. But it was a tough call to make that decision – Mallory had no cold symptoms, no runny nose, no sneezing, no fever, no changes in appetite or activity or sleep. Just a cough that wasn’t getting better.
We got her in on Tuesday August 28. The peditrician examined her and confirmed no cold symptoms. No fever. Just a bad cough. But because my allergies were flaring up (like lots of peoples were), the doctor figured it was just asthma made worse by allergies and gave us a referral to the allergist. We were told to call if she (a) got a fever, (b) didn’t get better, or (c) got worse.
On Thursday, she wasn’t better but she wasn’t worse. Her cough had transitioned to not as frequent, but the cough itself sounded worse. The nurse said it sounded like she was getting better since it wasn’t as frequent and to just keep doing her breathing treatments and she’d get better. I wasn’t 100% convinced that she was actually getting better but figured that if the nurse thought she was, I would go with it for a few days.
We spent the weekend at the pool and with my sister’s kids and with friends and on my dad’s boat. Mallory continued to sound horrible as the weekend progressed and by Monday (Labor Day) morning, I couldn’t stand it any more. I called the on-call number for her doctor’s office and they said that she should be seen and to take her to emergency. I got my sister to watch Carson and we headed to the new children’s emergency room at Mott.
We were brought back to a room right away, talked to a doc right away, got sent for x-rays right away, and then we waited…to find out the chest x-rays were clear. They did a swab for pertussis, just in case, and then gave her a dose of antibiotics so if it was pertussis, she could still go to school the next day. We were sent on our way with instructions to call her regular doctor for the results. We spent the last day of summer at the pool – hard to believe school was starting the next day!
Tuesday morning we sent our sweet girl off to her first day of First Grade. I sent a note to her teacher warning her that Mallory had a bad cough that made it sound like she was dying but she was fine.
Later Tuesday aftenroon, I left a message with the doctor’s office, asking about the results of her pertussis test. I didn’t hear back, so we continued on with our day and got ready for Mallory’s first gymnastics class. As soon as I paid and was about to sit down for her class to start, my phone rang and it was the Washtenaw County Health Department informing me that Mallory had tested positive for pertussis. The next three hours were crazy.
- We had to leave gymnastics right that minute.
- She is contagious until she’d finished a full 5-day course of antibiotics.
- She couldn’t go to school the rest of the week
- Rick, Carson & I also had to start a 5-day course of antibiotics
The lady from the health department wanted to know when Mallory started coughing; I’m not sure she was happy to hear me say “…um, mid-July?” but I went on to explain how her cough had changed a couple of times and really only got bad the end of last week. The lady from the health department needed to know everywhere Mallory may have been in close contact with other people over the past couple of weeks (including the first day of school, daycare last week, swim class last week, etc).
I had to scramble to call Carson’s doctor to have them call in his antibiotics. I had to scramble to call my doc to have them call in my antibiotics. I had to get Rick to have one of the team docs call him in some antibiotics. Then I had to talk to the health department some more, and the nurse from Mallory’s doctor’s office, and call & text all the friends we hung out with the past week to warn them.
Then I had to go pick up the antibiotics; I got to the store and realized I didn’t have Mallory’s paper prescription that the ER had given me the day before so we had to come back home to get that and we got back to the pharmacy (that closes at 7p) at 6.54p. The pharmacist told me she was waiting for M’s to show up since Carson’s had come through, and then Rick’s, and then she checked somewhere else to find mine, and knew Mallory would have one too.
I feel horrible that I carried on as normal all weekend and sent her to school on Tuesday, knowing how many people she came in contact with. But it is proof that that “mom intuition” that everyone told me about when I was pregnant with Mallory is no joke. I *knew* something wasn’t right last week when I took her to the doctor and I *knew* something wasn’t right when I called the nurse on Thursday and I really knew something wasn’t right over the weekend when I finally took her to the ER. But I kept telling myself “oh, just wait one more day…maybe it will be better” because we thought it was just allergies/asthma.
We had a fun day at home today – she watched a ton of TV and rationalized that since she wasn’t going to school, that she should be allowed to have sugar cereal for breakfast. I’m sad about her missing the first week of school and learning more about her new friends and teacher and classroom. Luckily she knows about seven other kids in her class so that will help her not feel like a total new kid when she does get to go back on Monday. And since she will be done with her antibiotics Friday (and thus no longer contagious), we shouldn’t miss the first Michigan home game on Saturday.
So – the moral of the story is that you can get pertussis even with the pertussis vaccine. Being vaccinated will help you not have as severe of a cough, and hopefully will shorten the duration of the cough, but other than the five days of antibiotics to make you not be contagious, there isn’t anything you can do for it. I will tell you that listening to your sweet baby girl sound as horrible as she does is brutal. We can’t do anything for her other than telling her to keep drinking her water and juice and holding her when she’s coughing.