肺炎 Pneumonia

It's hard to start a brand new blog, and the first post no less, with such an inauspicious subject. The fact is that my 9 year-old daughter caught a flu bug in school which catapulted into pneumonia. She started with fever last Thursday, then she developed a sore throat, and then coughs. I am usually able to control my children's fever with Tylenol (Acetaminophen) and/or Advil/Motrin (Ibuprofen). On this occasion, I was able to control my daughter's fever with a combination of Tylenol and Advil every 4-6 hours. I do pay a lot of attention to the right dosage to give her. Since she's old enough to swallow pills (she actually prefers it), I would break an adult pill (500 mg) in half and have her swallow it.

Acetaminophen dosage:
http://www.tylenol.com/page.jhtml?id=tylenol/children/subchild.inc

Ibuprofen dosage:
http://www.kidsgrowth.com/resources/articledetail.cfm?id=2293

I usually don't have a habit of bringing my children to see a doctor as soon as they get sick, but I'm fully aware at what point I would need to bring them in.

Monday was a federal holiday and my daughter developed a nasty cough and her fever was still there. When she coughed all night Monday (no cough medication was able to alleviate her cough), I decided to take her in to see her pediatrician.

Her regular pediatrician was not available so we saw an experience retired doctor who was there to help out. Anyways, although he wasn't able to hear the telltale sign of pneumonia on his stethoscope, he ordered an X-ray on her chest. Soon we heard the verdict. She has consolidated pneumonia! I wish I had my laptop with me so I can look it up. In any case, my daughter was getting weaker by the minute. I asked my husband to come to the doctor's office after work, so he can carry my daughter around. The doctor recommended an injection of Rocephin and 2 types of antibiotics (Zithromax and Augmentin) for treatment.

Her doctor's explanation for so many antibiotics was that he was not sure which strain of bacteria caused her consolidated pneumonia. The usually strain is easier to treat, but since her place of infection in her lung is low on her back next to the heart, it was not possible to extract a sample of her infection and test it. He suspects that she has the stronger pneumonia strain--pneumococcal which is prevalent in hospitals. That's his reasoning for giving her the Rocephin shot which equals to giving her antibiotics intravenously.

I signed the paper for the Rocephin injection and waited out to see if she had any allergic reaction to it after injection. After 30 minutes of waiting, she seemed better (except for the pain on her thigh where the needle went in--not her favorite experience!). It's obvious that the drug worked.

Four hours later, we were home and she got to rest some more. I went on-line to look up consolidated pneumonia. Meanwhile, my sister and her husband, both physicians in Canada, was shocked with the heavy-handiness of the doctor prescribing so many (and strong) antibiotics without knowing exactly what type of pneumonia bacteria she had.

This is when I realized that there is no right or wrong answers and even doctors in family practice can vary quite a bit in terms of treatments for the same disease.

As she recovers, I am grateful that during this course of treatment, nothing out of the ordinary happened to my daughter. Just last week, I read a Taiwan news article about a 10 year-old girl who died from the results of complications from a flu/cold after only 4 days. That story was at the back of my mind when I brought my daughter in to see her doctor yesterday.