H1N1
So apparently my son has H1N1.
Or had - he seems like he's doing pretty well today. Saturday evening he had a high fever and was shivering and miserable; some Tylenol fixed him right up but as soon as the Tylenol would run out he'd go back to miserable.
This ran through to this morning when he seemed to just snap out of it. We took him to a doctor because he still has a bit of a fever and after ruling out all the other usual causes of a fever in a toddler (throat infection, ear infection, etc), he said it was most likely the Swine Flu.
I find it a bit hard to believe, but if we're through it then that's a good thing.
I had a good experience at the clinic we visited in Brantford. We left home at 5:45pm and were back home at 8pm, and we spent over an hour not actually at the clinic. They let us register, said we could come back in and hour, and when we came back, brought us in within about 10 minutes. And I didn't know they could do a UTI check on-the-spot like that. Very nice.
If you're curious what the course of H1N1 might look like in a mild case like what Matthew had, here's some notes I took:
6:10pm Saturday, noticed Matthew didn't seem "normal". We checked his temperature and it wasn't far off normal at 99.3 but he seemed very sleepy / lethargic, unusually so for him.
At 6:30pm his temperature was 100.3. 6:50pm it was 102.9. 8:10pm, 103.5.
When I finally talked to someone at TeleHealth, they said not to bring him to the hospital unless his fever was over 105 degrees. Wow, that's high. At 103 it felt like I could cook eggs on his back.
We kept him on Tylenol through the night Saturday night, and Sunday morning, he woke up with pretty bad shivers. He had the shivers on and off through Saturday in a predictable pattern: He'd start shivering, we'd give him some Tylenol, and until the Tylenol kicked him, his temperature would spike up pretty quickly and he would seem lethargic and miserable until suddenly the Tylenol did its job and the fever would drop and he'd perk right up. He'd stay happy until about a half hour before his next dose was due when the cycle would start again.
Today, Monday, after about 2 days of this, he's doing fine, temperature stable at under 100 and no Tylenol.
Hopefully it stays that way.
I wanted to post this to help all the people googling symptoms to see what to expect - this is how it went for one little boy.
(Oh, and if you've got one of those digital thermometers - buy a backup battery. It's no fun having to run out to find one because the one in the unit dies on you).