She’ll Be Needing Stitches…And Benadryl
Remember when my kiddo fell off the couch and I made it into a funny gif?
It’s funny when no one gets hurt. It’s NOT so funny when your baby crashes off the couch in the other direction. Into the corner of an end table. Again, I was right there with her as she was having one of those horrible baby ideas to climb from the couch over to the end table. I was grabbing her when she lunged and cracked her head on the table. My husband was home, thank goodness, because the house exploded in a cacophony of all three children crying and screaming. I was able to get to the doctor’s office immediately and while it was a clean cut that she could have glued in office, she recommended I take her to the ER in the hopes that a plastic surgeon could stitch her up for better results.
It was not super fun times, that’s for sure. And if you get skeeved by talk of blood and gore, click on over for happier reading. Once her initial pain subsided she was fine — except that it was bedtime. Cue me solo-battling her for two hours while we waited for the doctor to arrive.
Then, once he did, it was into the baby papoose to restrain her while she proceeded to cry for 45 minutes while he stitched her up. Good thing we opted for the ER because her cut was so deep that it went to the bone and required several layers of stitches to get her fixed up. This song has been in my head for days:
Once she was free of restraints, she was back to her happy albeit tired self. We were started on a regimen of antibiotics in case of infection (which also led to me getting to the pharmacy in blizzard conditions). Her injury was healing nicely. And then she woke one morning like this:
She had hives all over the rest of her body, too, so I immediately took her to the doctor. Turns out, she has a penicillin allergy. The next morning when she woke up, her face was so swollen I couldn’t even recognize her and I won’t even post the images here because it was so bad. She looked more like this:
She was a little clingier than usual, but fairly happy, considering how bad it looked. Day 3 of the reaction, her back looked like this:
Yesterday was day 4 of the hives, and her facial swelling had finally gone down to the point that she looked like my baby again. The hives on her body are still pretty red, but they’ve calmed considerably. I’m hoping by tomorrow her face will be hive-free and we’ll be on our way back to normal. Then it’s time to get the stitches out and put this saga behind us. I’m just thankful that her reaction wasn’t any more severe and that she never had any trouble breathing or anything. It was scary enough that she was so swollen she didn’t even look like my baby!
Anyone ever dealt with a penicillin allergy? How long did it take for everything to return to normal? —Erin