Keeping things interesting

All summer long, A. has been having pretty severe reactions to mosquito and spider bites, developing huge, red welts. Truly massive. Well, yesterday morning he woke up with a tiny red splotch along his jaw, with a tiny, crusted over, yellow pin prick-sized spot in the center. As the hours went by it began to swell larger, and larger, and larger, until it was the size of a golfball sticking out. He looked like he had a lopsided case of the mumps. We dosed him up on benadryl, and kept an eye on it. At bedtime, I decided that if it hadn't improved by morning I was going to take him into the Saturday clinic at the doctor's office.

Sure enough, it hadn't reduced in size, and the redness was growing and spreading, with pink traveling down his neck. The doctor took a look and said that because of the bite's proximity to the glands in his neck, his body was fighting it extra hard, and the glands were beginning to enlarge. She went ahead and started him on antibiotics, in addition to benadryl, and warm compresses. He's taking Ceflax (I think between the two of my kids this is only our third time on antibiotics, and our first time with this particular one), and has to take it 4X/day. For a kid who's only awake for 12 hours/day, that's a dose every 3 hours. LOL - poor kid is getting tired of me coming at him with medicine constantly troughout the day!

Here's what he looked like earlier today...

Kind of hard to see the extent of the swelling (but can I just say that my kid has the cutest darn earlobes I've ever seen?). He was swinging while watching a video on tv and wasn't being very cooperative for the camera. With any luck, he'll be good as new by the first day of school on Tuesday! ;P