Last night around 1:15, Sophia woke up crying. She didn’t know why she was crying, she just knew she couldn’t stop. She had a lot of head congestion which of course was made worse by her being upset. I tried giving her medicine, laying down with her, giving her a drink of water, pretty much everything in my bag of tricks. Still she kept crying.
I was afraid she was going to wake up Trevor and/or keep Dan awake, so I took her out to the den (at the opposite end of the house) and laid across our big leather chair with her. She was mostly laying down, but her head was more upright than it would have been in bed. After she finally stopped crying, she managed to fall asleep. I waited a little while, then took her back to her bed and she slept the rest of the night without incident.
To most people, that might just seem like a fluky little incident, but coupled with the fact that she’s had a runny nose for the past two days, to me it meant that she had an ear infection. No fever, no complaints of her ears hurting, but I was betting that it was an ear infection. Every time that girl has had a runny nose and disrupted sleep patterns, she’s had an ear infection.
He checked her breathing, looked in her throat, and then her nose. He looked in the left ear, and then the right. As he peered into the right ear, he said, “There it is.” Turns out she does have an ear infection. He said that on a scale of 1-10, it was about a 4 and that by Saturday night it probably would’ve been full blown. I said that was why I had called today. No way am I heading into a 3 day weekend with a kid who has an ear infection and is up half the night.
So, it just goes to prove, sometimes Mom knows best. I don’t have a medical degree or even a science-heavy education, but I know my kids like the back of my hand, and I think that qualifies me as an expert, at least where they are concerned.
http://gloriana.wordpress.com/2007/01/12/dr-mom/
