We've had maybe 2 semi-nice days in the last two to three weeks. We milked the nice day on Sunday for all it was worth, going to Landstuhl where they had a little outdoor fair and Sunday opening of the stores. (Sunday store openings are a big thing. Everything shuts down on Sundays. Even grocery stores. And no 7-11s. If you're out of milk, you're out of milk. Unless you're American and have base privileges.)
Other than just being sick of rain and cold (it's about 45 degrees F right now, with a high today of 55), I really want it to warm up so that Katrina has a chance to get rid of her chronic cough. Last Saturday night, after a pretty normal day and a visit to the base equivalent of a Chuck E. Cheese, Katrina suddenly developed a fever of almost 103. Since she was on day 3 of her third course of antibiotics since January, we were a bit more concerned than if she hadn't been taking the meds. After a dose of Ibuprofen and a call to the nurse line, we took her to the ER at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. That's the big American hospital here. When you hear about soldiers being taken to Germany after being wounded on the battlefield? This is where they come.
Anyway, we saw in action how much more interventionist the American practice of medicine is over German practice. Of course, by the time the triage nurse looked at Katrina, the ibuprofen had brought her temperature back to normal. But the nurse was horrified that Katrina had been coughing since January and had not yet had a chest X-ray. So off we went to Radiology.
Katrina was absolutely calm and wonderfully cooperative through all of this, even though we had woken her and bundled her into the car after the nurse line put the fear of God into us. (The ER doc said that the nurse line should just have a recording saying "Please go directly to the emergency room." But when you tell a nurse your child's symptoms and that she's asleep in her bedroom, and the nurse tells you to go check that your child is still breathing, well, it freaks you out a little.)
The only complaint Katrina had through the whole ER visit was that she didn't get to see the X-ray of her chest. I think that girl is going to be in the medical field. There was a poster of the anatomy of the ear in the exam room, which fascinated Katrina. We had to tell her what every part was called and how it all worked (if we knew, that is). Then she wanted to know what all of the medical intruments/equipment was and what it was used for.
The doctor on duty said that the X-ray didn't show anything. But he also said he was going to get a colleague to look at it to make sure, so I wonder whether maybe there was a little something there. So he gave us a bottle of Tylenol and a bottle of Ibuprofen for the fever, and Zyrtec to try to dry up any drainage that could make her cough. He told us to overlap the Tylenol and the ibuprofen for 48 hours, which, truthfully, I thought was a bit of overkill. So I gave her ibuprofen at night and checked her temp throughout the day before giving her yet more medicine. But maybe the doc was right, since the fever did recur (though only to about 100).
So that was Saturday night a week ago. That Tuesday, when Katrina was still running a low-level fever off and on, I took her back to the pediatrician. This would be the third visit in three weeks, not counting the ER. You know you're in trouble when the doc comes in, looks at her record and info on the computer screen, and then sighs, rakes his hands through his hair, and mumbles to himself. Really, this doesn't inspire confidence.
"Obviously," the doc says, "her current antibiotic is not working." Um, yeah.
He examines Katrina and then starts talking in German to his nurse, who is at the computer typing in notes. What I hear, because of my woeful lack of anything approaching German comprehension is "blah, blah, blah, blah, chest X-ray, blah, blah." I pipe up to say that she got an X-ray at the ER but they said it didn't show anything. He explains something to me about what an X-ray might or might not show that I cannot recall at the moment.
Then, more notes to the nurse: "blah, blah, blah, pneumonia, blah, blah, blah."
Wha?! "She has pneumonia?!" I say.
"Yeah, I think so," says the doctor matter-of-factly. "What I'm going to do is give you a different antibiotic that is more broad spectrum than the one she's on right now."
Apparently, pneumonia is not the cause for concern I thought it was, because the visit ended exactly the way it did when she had "just a cold," and when she had "bronchitis," and when she had "some sort of viral infection like bronchitis that is going around." We got a prescription for yet another antibiotic and were sent on our way. Granted, the dosage seems to be a bit more aggressive.
About Wednesday afternoon, Katrina perked up and seemed to regain her energy. The fever's been gone since then, and she's been bopping around as usual. She has one more week to go on this, her fourth antibiotic. She's still coughing.
