No fun

So it turns out Donovan's reaction to amoxicillin was a little more than we were prepared for. It started Tuesday night and we are just now starting to get our lives back to something a little closer to normal. The pictures from the previous post were from Tues night when we were going to bed. Wednesday Dono woke up at 2am and I saw they were worse. These were pictures from Wed morning after we woke up.

We send him to grammies like normal and she reports that he does well, but he is just a lot less active then he normally is, preferring to lay on the couch. We called the dr's office and they said, yes it sounds like a reaction to amoxicillin and you should keep giving him benadryl and watch for certain things, one of which was painful joints. So that night Donovan stops walking and is wanting to be held. He complains that his feet and ankles hurt him. So we call the dr's exchange, talk with a nurse and she sends us to the ER. So Donovan and I go and they were pretty impressed with his hives. By this time he is about 75% percent covered by them (even in his hair and on his ears). He also was pretty pathetic. Crying and whining that his body, legs, feet and hands are hurting him and he also had a fever of 101.6. It broke my heart and really scared me. They gave him ibuprofen and benadryl by mouth, and then he calmed down a little. The Dr there was very nice and reassuring that he was going to be ok and that the joint pain was normal with a reaction like he was having. He also said it was going to get a little worse probably and be better in 48 hours. He diagnosed his hives as "erythema multiform" for anyone who wants to go look that up.  This was Dono when we were waiting for our discharge papers.  We left the ER at 10:30 that night and Donovan was very restless from about 12-2am but finally fell asleep.

 Tom stayed home with him on Thursday. He told me he was pretty pathetic and after talking with one of the physicians I work with who scared the living crap out of me after I told him how Donovan was doing and also that he had Erythema multiform, I had Tom schedule and appt with the ped. to have him checked out again. Tom said he was really restless and very itchy, and benadryl wasn't helping, however cool wet rags on his legs seemed to calm him down nicely. The Dr. saw him and said he was confident he was just having a reaction to the Amoxicillin and that it wasn't something worse, like the Dr. I worked with had scared me into thinking. He told Tom that the swelling that Donovan was now having in his hands and feet was normal, and that we just needed to keep at it with the motrin and benadryl. He also told us to look out for lip blisters and swelling in his scrotum, but that we did not need to go to the ER again, that he was going to be fine.

When I got home Thursday night this is what I saw.

Poor guy's lower lip was swollen and he was in so much pain he would not turn his head to look at me. He had cool rags on his legs and his hands propped up on his chest/stomach because they were so swollen and hurting him so much. He was crying/whining most of the night. If Reese even touched him it would send him into a fit. Tom or I had to hold his cup for him to drink because holding anything hurt him. Peeing was so sad too. We had to hold him up, and if we had to set him on the floor for any amount of time he would scream and cry in pain. His hands and feet were so swollen, probably twice their normal size (in width). We distracted him with movies and TV but he was so uncomfortable. When I was sitting on the couch with him he started shaking, and I asked him what was wrong and he told me he was shaking because his legs were hurting. We finally tried to go to bed and I laid there with him to try and keep him calm. He asked me to roll him to his side as he was afraid to move at all. It was the saddest thing ever. Then to top it off, once we got in bed, his rash was only covering about 50% of him, but the itching seemed to intensify and he was non-stop itching himself, which made the pain and swelling worse. Twice he fell asleep for 20 minutes, but then he would wake himself up and start itching and almost panicking again. He would cry out for Tom and I, "I need you mommy! I need you daddy!" and it was so sad because there was nothing we could do. He had already had his medicine and the rags weren't working and he would complain he was too cold. So finally at 1 am Tom and I couldn't take it anymore. He had itched himself so raw that his eyes were starting to swell shut. So we called our neighbor over to stay with Reese and we headed to a different ER. These are the pictures from that trip.

Luckily Donovan looked so pathetic and the nurses were so impressed with his facial, hand and feet swelling that we got expedited back to a room and got to butt in front of lots of people. The doctors there were pretty impressed with his reaction, but also reassuring to us that they also believed it was just a gnarly reaction to the Amoxicillin and not something worse. This time they gave him Atarax, a different but similar medicine to Benadryl, Pepcid, for it's anti-histamine components, ibuprofen for the pain, and Prednisolone, a steroid for the rash. Soon after that he relaxed enough to fall asleep, sometime around 2:30am.

Luckily, after that Donovan was slept until 8am. He woke up and was a completely different kid from the pathetic thing we had seen the previous day. Both of his grandma's came over to help out with the kids (we had arranged that prior to Tom and I being up til 4am and them both calling into work) and that made him very happy. He was actually WALKING 10 minutes after he got up.  We went to the Dr that afternoon for both kids "well" visits that we had already planned so I got to go and ask the Dr all about what the hell was happening. The unfortunate thing he told us was that the steroid that Donovan got is kind of controversial because it doesn't necessarily end the immune reaction, it just pauses it, so there is a good chance after his doses were stopped, that the whole reaction would start back up with a vengence where it left off. That is not what we wanted to hear. So he tweaked our prescription to try to keep that from happening but we will just have to wait and see. He also said that this will probably last for 2 weeks total, maybe more. Lovely. He said benadryl doesn't help that much because the immune response has already started, and benadryl is best for preventing that from starting, not stopping it once it has.  This is what Dono looked like Friday afternoon after the Drs.

His hands were still swollen, although not as much as they were on Thursday so we were happy about that.

Fat feet. Again, still swollen but better than it had been on Thursday. (and yes, that is nail polish)

So that brings us to today. Today Donovan has been a little itchy but not bad at all, but still not his normal self. He was really trying to do too much, now that he is in not that much pain, which brings problems in it's self because he is not back to normal yet so he gets tired really fast, and crabby even faster. His hives come and go but are really not that noticeable. He went to our friends birthday party today and lasted an hour before he started complaining his hands were hurting him. Poor kid. And poor parents. The past two nights I have started to get a little anxious as the sun started setting since both wed and thurs nights were when things got bad and we headed to the ERs. Two ER trips in two nights is not a record I ever want to break. Hopefully our ped was wrong about his reaction getting bad again. I am scared if it does because he is in so much pain and all we can give him is Tylenol or Motrin. So anyways, that is the recap of our half week from hell. Say some prayers for us that he doesn't get much worse again and is back to his normal self by this time next week.