Ellie Follow Up from Attack of the Bugs

  

Ellie's poor legs after catching fireflies on Saturday morning

Earlier today after my appointment I showed the peds clinic what Ellie's legs looked like Saturday morning and they wanted to see her today. Well her dr thinks she was eaten alive by Chiggers (no clue what they are...) and she reacted badly to their bites because of the fact that her bites were from the knees and down. However, had she sat in the grass he said she would have been eaten really badly maybe causing us to need to take her into the ER.

We have upped her Zyrtec from 5ml's once a day to 5ml's 2x daily, dropped the benadryl down from 10ml's every 4 hours to every 6 hours due to the increased Zyrtec. He wants us to keep up with the hydrocortisone cream and calimine lotion (but make sure to NOT use any lotions with benadryl added in the lotion).

Next time she gets eaten badly like that he wants to see her in the clinic while her legs are swollen and reacting badly to reassess and make sure we are still on the right track.

Things to watch for, if she has bites on her upper body or face and she shows any swelling in her face at all and are not able to get her in to see him within a few hours then he wants us to tell the staff we are taking her to the ER and which ER we are going. He also let e know any ER trip with any facial swelling will automatically place her on steroids. At that point he will want to follow her closely due to her GI/Lung issues to make sure nothing in the ER was missed.

The peds staff wants us to play around with different bug sprays to see if we can find one that will work better for her as the off clearly does nothing for her. He also wants us to try light weight, long pants, long sleeves, light colored clothing to reduce the skin contact for the bugs around here. If she reacted that bad this time the concern is will she continue to react the same way, or will each time she gets bites increase the reaction she has.

Oh weight check today Ellie was hovering between 40.14 and 41lbs!!! The scale finally stopped on 41!! She has finally gotten back to 41lbs!! Now the question is HOW long will she keep this weight?