question at the end of my novel.
hello,
backstory (all children are unvaxed):
about 4 weeks ago. son, 3.5, comes down w/ slight fever but is in good spirits, goes through usual cold sequence, ends in cough that sounds pretty 'junky' for about two weeks. then is gone, and has remained gone since.
daughter, 3mo, about a week later develops slight fever, congestion, a bit of coughing and general ill feeling. take her to (not our usual) pediatrician who sends us to ER for breathing difficulty and suspected pertussis. chest x ray is done, swabs for RSV,and influenza are taken. and a blood culture is performed. she becomes well pretty much instantly the next day and continues to be well for over a week. the pediatrician during our follow up insists she has pertussis and that i treat my entire family accordingly. i decide to wait for the test results, which i am told were negative. the blood culture was for lymphocytes and that number was 47.6 which i guess is elevated for adults, but in children under age 2 is normal. our pe
daughter, 2, about a week later cycles through something very similar, is still coughing here and there. nothing violent, but definitely congested and snotty for a good few days.
daughter, 15, somewhere in all of this comes down with a cold. very snotty. maybe a bit of a cough here and there.
husband, develops sinus congestion, extreme mancold and then a resulting cough that isnt too terrible.
our 3mo. starts coughing a bit again about 11 days ago from this post and about a week after she'd originally been seen. a few days after that she begins to get very congested and her cough develops into something very 'junky' sounding. she is extremely snotty and i have to use the bulb syringe on her constantly.
i worry for her since the seeds of possible pertussis have been planted and that she is so young and has a twin sister who is always so close to her. a few nights ago, she coughed for a good spell (maybe half a minute) and took a bit of time to recover, spat up a little bit in between and then eventually went back to normal. she coughed a bit over night in her sleep but responded to me rubbing baby vicks on my chest and sleeping close to her. yesterday evening, while we nursed, she did the same thing, this time turning pretty red. the coughing lasted about a minute and i ran to the bathroom and ran the hot water while she seemed to struggle to recover. there was no whooping, no long gasps of breath, just kind of jerky coughing for about a minute longer until she recovered. she didnt turn blue but definitely would get red in the face as her body worked to cough these little sputtering spasms.
we called 911. had her taken to the hospital where they did all the same tests, another chest x ray (my husband is extremely paranoid about pneumonia) and kept her monitored for sats (which stayed normal). she nursed happily and looked fine...then we brought her home, i nursed her and she drifted to sleep. hubs carried her to our bed, she was congested so he syringed her nose and she went into yet another fit of coughing that lasted about two minutes, had a lot of mucous come out of her nose and she spat up a bit of her milk onto the floor. i panic.
i have been reading the pertussis archives in this forum and have been giving the twins SA in breastmilk since the original coughing episode. last night she slept well, about two hours after the second coughing episode she began to cough in her sleep, but only for about four seconds at a time and nowhere near as violent. she didnt wake up and i just put more vicks on my chest and slept close to her and nursed her in case something was tickling her throat. she woke up this morning extremely congested, her snot has turned to a dark yellow/green which indicates, to me, the end of a cold...she coughed a few more times and went back to sleep...no coughing all morning long so far.
her twin has started to cough this morning, but only had nasal congestion over these last few weeks.
after all of that, i realize that it very well COULD be WC, though im not certain why the other children would have such regular cold like illnesses over a period of weeks and then just get better...
my question is this:
when in the paroxysmal stage of pertussis, do you still continue to have severe cold symptoms? what i read is kind of ambiguous...that in between coughing fits, the patient is 'fine'...does that mean no snot/regular coughing/sneezing? i wonder this because everything else points to a cold
