the Hamelins vs. the cough

Eric has a cough... again. I have seriously been to the doctors with him every other week since like November with this stinkin' cough. It goes away for the most part then comes back and then goes away and then comes back. However, it never completely goes away, it's just not as frustrating. Tuesday night I came home from school to a coughing child and he felt warm. I took his temp on Wednesday morning and then we were off to the doctors. I thought for sure that he had an ear infection but they said no. They claimed that he just had a virus. So we used the nebuilizer and just dealt with it. Thursday and Friday he did ok and by Thursday afternoon his fever was gone. This weekend however, we have been fighting this cough with a vengence. He still has no fever but the nebuilizer didn't seem to be working and he was up all night coughing. I'm exhausted! I ended up giving him a neb treatment at 3:45am last night just to get him to stop coughing and thankfully it worked... for a few hours at least. We gave him a steroid to help him stop with the coughing and his appetite has increased today. His cough was barely there today and he was outside on our porch or in his room all day playing with the windows open. This version of the cough has responded to the cold air and it makes him not cough. He was in a great mood this morning. He fell asleep for a nap and woke up way too early and was just a grouch for the rest of the day. Part of it was hunger because he ate a ton of snacks in the afternoon and part of it is just plain exhaustion which I think we are all suffering from at this point. We didn't give him his nebuilizer all day because he wasn't coughing much but by the end of the day the cough was back so we gave him a treatment before bed and he was dead asleep by 8pm. Hopefully tonight he'll make it through a good portion of the night without coughing. We leave his window open a little bit at night in the hopes that the cool air will help him. Last night I kept finding him sleeping on the floor so hopefully he'll stay in his bed. He seems to like the floor lately because even when he woke up from his nap he didn't want to lie in our bed he wanted to lie on the floor beside the bed. I don't know what that's all about! So we should be hearing at some point this week from a pediatric pulmonologist who happens to be a family friend who can hopefully see him ASAP and give us some answers. My mom also did some research about the antibiotic he's on for his hydronephrosis and one of the things she found is that one of the long term side effects is a cough. We're not sure how true this is but I'm going to explore it further! Keep your fingers crossed that tomorrow he'll continue to improve.