Most expensive ibuprofen ever

Day four of this nasty cold: Matt wound up taking Monday and Tuesday off work and doing lot of sleeping. He's back at work today, finally feeling somewhat better. He and Little Bear have been fever-free since last night but still have coughs, and I'm in my third day of a bad sore throat and headache but no real fever. Little Bear thinks he has the energy to run around like a wild thing, and we all certainly seem to be on the mend, so hopefully we will all be healthy again soon.

My throat didn't get the memo that it was supposed to be all better this morning: thanks to timezone differences, I had to interview a contact for a freelance project at 6:30 am, and had a scratchy frog-in-throat voice for it. Oh well.

The real excitement of this bug, though, came on Sunday. Matt and Little Bear were both laying around feeling miserable and feverish, and at one point, Little Bear got himself too worked up and coughed too hard and threw up... all over the fancy forehead thermometer. We rinsed it off quickly and cleaned it up (and him, of course), and it seemed fine. 

After Little Bear woke up from his nap, I took his temperature-- 102.2 F --and gave him Tylenol. A half hour later he still felt so hot that I decided to check him again. The thermometer read 106.8 F the first try, 107 F the second. The possibility that the thermometer was broken niggled, but with no way to double-check, we couldn't risk not doing something about it. Of course it had to be a Sunday, so there was nowhere else to go but the ER.

The ER nurse scanned his temperature at 102.2 F again, and the PA gave him ibuprofen, checked back in an hour and saw that he'd gone down to 100.2 F, and sent us to buy a new thermometer on our way home. She told us to overlap giving him Tylenol and ibuprofen for the next couple of days to keep him comfortable; sometimes little ones need both to help bring down a high fever, she said.

I think we did the right thing by going in, based on what the thermometer showed us, but oh, that's going to be a lot of money to pay for one dose of ibuprofen!