Wake-Up Call

I’m very glad to say that we’re all feeling better now. The flu hit our household hard – Jason was the only one that didn’t get it. Rebecca took the brunt of this illness, having a temperature over 39.6 degrees Celsius (between 103 – 104 degrees for our American friends) for four days. After a week and a half she’s starting to build up her stamina, and her trademark appetite is almost back to normal.
Seeing how brutal this virus was on our otherwise healthy daughter, I was really afraid of how it would affect Ryan. For a few days before the H1N1 vaccine was available to high-risk individuals, I was on the phone trying to find a way for him to safely get the vaccine. I was hoping that someone in town would be able to do a skin test with the vaccine to see if Ryan would have a reaction. Unfortunately, only allergists are able to do skin tests. As much as I love living in a small town, our access to specialists is really lacking. When we lived in Peterborough, we had a fantastic allergist that wanted to see Ryan three to four times per year. After moving to Owen Sound, we were referred to an allergist in Kitchener-Waterloo (which is two hours away from us), who only wanted to see Ryan when he needed to have allergy testing.
Here’s the deal – Ryan hasn’t been tested in three years. There is a good chance that his food allergies may have changed and I don’t even know for sure if he still is allergic to eggs. I hope that he’s not, but no one in their right mind would give him that vaccine without doing the appropriate tests. This was a real wake-up call for me – we really need to get this boy tested again. H1N1 will not be the last pandemic…there will be others. If we want to do as much as possible to protect him, we need to know what allergies we are dealing with.
Luckily for us, we have a fantastic nurse practitioner. She happened to call us on the afternoon that Rebecca’s temperature spiked and we were in her office two hours later. While it was too late for Rebecca to take an antiviral medication, our nurse gave me a prescription of Tamiflu for Ryan just in case he got the flu as well. This was the back-up plan I was hoping for. Sure enough, two days later Ryan’s temperature hit 39.6 degrees Celsius. We filled the Tamiflu prescription, and Ryan’s temperature was back to normal a few hours after the first dose. His only symptom of the flu was a loose cough…incredible. We may have won this battle, but now I’m preparing for an even greater one – convincing Ryan to get tested again.