We had looked up "pink eye" on the internet and saw that there were three causes: allergy, bacterial, or viral. Typically, bacterial is the one most doctors treat, and therefore, is what most doctors assume is the cause. Turns out Jake is not typical. Of course. The ophthalmologist (doesn't that word look funny?) put this funky dye stuff in his eye and did some sort of blue light on there and pronounced it pink eye of the viral kind, which is apparently much more difficult to get rid of (unless we're very lucky and it's something called adnovirus, which I am probably spelling incorrectly, but it's a virus, it can bite me).... because with the adnovirus, your body can build up immunity to it in eight to ten days and fight it off. However, since Jake had recently been sick, his immune system hasn't really regrouped yet, and even if it is this adnovirus, he might take longer. If it's some other virus, lots of nasty things could happen, like scar tissue on the cornea, harming his vision, so to be safe, she precribed him some anti-viral drops (which is quite different and much more expensive than the anti-bacterial drops we'd already been given before).
And apparently the virus is so unusual, none of our regular pharmacies had the drops; I was most grateful for a very determined nurse who called around to every pharmacy in creation and finally found one bottle of drops, not terribly far away.
I swear, if I hear of some freakish strain of illness within a hundred miles of either kid, I'm locking them up for the duration, because they will not only get it, it will mutate into some impossible-to-heal-unless-you-hock-your-house version of the virus, only to infect my kids. Grrr.
Posted by toni at March 8, 2004 08:03 PM