Holidays are crazy busy. Visits too and from grandkids and kids and more kids....It is very much like living inside a Petri dish.
The Family Group Chat started filling up with reports: Influenza B, asthma flares, hand-foot-and-mouth disease. We do our best to stay away from it all but.....Family must Gather.
Christmas Eve morning Curlygirl had a fever, 100.4 or something like it. She had to soldier on, like any mom at Christmas. There are a thousand things to do. Next morning, she asked if we were coming over. She hadn't had a fever in over 24 hours. We went. It was wonderfully chaotic. Gifts opened, Santa's gifts exclaimed over, an amazing abundance of joy and laughter. Curlygirl got a ton of gifts from Bean's daddy, things that he had written down in his phone's notes every time during the year that he saw her wanting something specific. As far as I could tell he couldn't possibly have missed anything. I am incredibly impressed.
By Sunday Babygirl wasn't feeling great. She skipped Christmas Part II and I went to Bella's house to party with a different set of grands. It crossed my mind that picking up a Covid/Flu test pack wouldn't be the worst idea. Somewhere between the thought and the drive home, I completely forgot about it.
When I got home there was a thermometer out on the kitchen counter.
The sinking feeling I got when I saw that defies description. Historically fevers have been accompanied by ambulance rides and long hospital stays.
I went to check on her, and although she was coughing, she didn't have a fever, so I went to bed, trusting her to come get me if she needed me.
When I woke up I went to check on her just as she was pulling the thermometer out of her mouth. 103.3 degrees. Well, that's just ducky.
Short of driving a few miles to a 24 hour pharmacy I have no access to in-home testing. And honestly, her lips were dry and cracking and she really didn't look at all well.
I told her I could go pick up tests and hope that the on-call doc would send in whatever was appropriate, or we could just skip the lost time and go the the ED. She'd almost rather poke out her own eye with an icepick than to go to a hospital, but she wisely took the option.
Her history, temperature, shortness of breath and rapid heart rate bumped her to the front of the line.Triage went off to hunt for a room and she had labs, IV fluids and x-rays in progress within less than half an hour. It took a minute for the previous occupants' location to update because there were some confused people looking for him, including the lab tech. She was carrying 2 tubes, not even close to what I knew Babygirl was going to need. She came back a minute later with 2 blood culture containers and more than half a dozen tubes. One of the things we want to avoid is "I need to add this extra test now that I have the results of first set."
Babygirl lay on her back, covered her eyes with a damp cloth and didn't move for 3 hours. She was clearly uncomfortable and honestly, not unconscious exactly but definitely not .... present.
2 Liters of fluid. Tylenol. Test results: Dehydration. Influenza A. Kidney okay but dry. Liver is cranky, back off on the Tylenol. WTH - not even the same thing as the grands had at all!
We were there a couple of extra hours as the ER doc reached out to the transplant team to find out if she gets the OLD influenza medication or the NEW one, or if either would help much given the status of her immune system. Ultimately a prescription was sent in for the older medication as there isn't a lot of data for people like her with the newer one.
We went home and she went to bed for the rest of the afternoon. She had a lot of nausea, so I had to remind her to drink anyway.
And to answer your next question: She had this years' flu shot November 3rd, plenty of time for it to work as well as it was going to work. Sometimes the flu shot has the wrong strain. Sometimes her immune system just doesn't respond to vaccines.
But it's just the flu, right?
I haven't looked at this years' stats, honestly, but one way you can tell how bad Influenza is in any given season is by the number of pediatric deaths. Yeah, children. Typically in New York State, if I recall correctly, there are about 8-12 pediatric deaths from Influenza annually. 2020 was unusual in that there were none because of remote learning and masking.
But it's never "just the 'flu" for people like Babygirl. Influenza is primarily a lung disease, and the damage it does frequently leads to pneumonia in vulnerable populations: Elderly, children, and immunocompromised. Although the virus is being treated we still need to be vigilant about new symptoms for a couple of weeks.
I felt like crap most of today. I asked Bella to bring me a Covid/flu test and I'm negative. I suspect I'm just tired.
Many people have had rough times in 2025. For me, though, it has been joyful, free, and peaceful - one of the best years I've had in a long time. I'm grateful to be reminded of fragility of all of those things. I am grateful to know that despite the wobbles, they are and remain the bedrock of my life.
I am, as always, grateful for the prayers of friends and family, always present,
DeeDee
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