Birthday Celebrations and Doctor’s Visits

First birthday celebrations: Dean had to blow out the candle for her.:-)

I had been planning Aria’s birthday celebration in my head for a month before her birthday. I wanted to make her a big peanut butter cookie with a happy face on it as was the tradition for the first birthday in our family. Thanks to Jayne’s convection oven, making the cookie was possible and I gave Aria peanut butter a couple weeks before her birthday to test for any allergies. There weren’t any. All systems go.

It’s time to eat up a BIG peanut butter cookie–a Goff family tradition.

This was going to be a simple celebration with just the three of us and Dean & Jayne coming on Saturday, the day after her actual birthday. Compared with the elaborate first birthday celebrations that the Indians do, it was especially simple. But simple often equals pleasant in my books. So on Thursday, I went to Jayne’s and made a large round golden-brown cookie.

Unfortunately, things went downhill in the health department from there. The Monday previously, John came down with an illness that involved a constricted chest, fever, chills, and then heavy coughing and phlegm. We wondered

A not-so-happy birthday girl.

if he had perchance gotten malaria as “’tis the season”. However, the tests came back negative and we tried to keep the rest of us from getting ill. On the same day John came down with his sickness, I caught a cold—thankfully a slight one, but tiring for me, especially as John was mostly bed-ridden. John had a good day on Thursday and went into work; we assumed the worst was over and that Aria had sailed through without a hitch. However, in the evening he was bad again and Aria came down with a high fever—much to our dismay, she’d caught the same thing John had. It was her worst fever so far and we fought to keep it low enough so she wouldn’t have to hurry off to the doctor’s. The next day (her birthday) she spent most of the time fighting off the fever and a few chills that were thankfully not as severe as John’s had been. There were a few times when the fever-reducing medicine took effect and she had a couple cheerful spells. She opened her gifts wrapped in bright colourful bags and tried to put on her clothes over her head. The day was low-key to say the least.

A bright spot in her day after opening her gifts.

She had the same good day on Saturday that John had had in his illness so we got to enjoy the celebration all the same with pizza and peanut butter cookie, but like John, she deteriorated again the next day. Then came THE question: should we take her to the doctor’s or not? What about antibiotics? If you know me well, you probably know that doctors are not my thing. I don’t have anything against them as people, but I disagree with most of what they have to say and how they treat sickness. I don’t know if I became this way because of a dad who hates going to the doctor, a mum who’s into the natural healing type stuff, or from my own research—undoubtedly a combination of those and other things. John had been in contact with a woman who we’d been directed to who was a Christian pediatrician and so far, I was not annoyed with her, though, typically, I questioned some of her advice. I told John that if there was no improvement by Monday, I was willing to take Aria in. There wasn’t any, so we braved some horrid traffic that clogs the streets of Hyderabad and took her in. I’d only been to hospitals before—dismal places that look dark, somewhat dingy, and have horrid fluorescent lighting: in a word, uninviting. I was expecting something of the same at the clinic, but instead a woman opened the door of a building to us and we were ushered into a rather small, but

Not herself yet, but on the mend.

cheery room, decorated with all sorts of the things that might amuse a baby: baby posters, squeaky toys, a mobile that played tinkery music—Aria was pleased. Aria amused herself with these things as the woman examined her and only let out a protest once when she didn’t want her throat looked at. All in all I was pleased with the experience and the woman recommended medicine for the next 24 hours instead of immediately jumping to antibiotics. She said if there was no improvement after that, to begin the antibiotic prescription. I felt good about that and the woman blessed us even further by not charging us a cent!
Aria HAS improved, though she’s not completely over it yet, still coughing a bit and throwing the occasional temper tantrum, but altogether, on the road to recovery.:-)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 2:25 am and is filed under Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.