If you're not familiar with the Munch's little medical issue, I'll catch you up to speed...5 1/2 weeks after she was born, Daddy suspected a fever. Of course it was late at night leading into a weekend, and with a newborn, you can't take chances, so we hurried over to the ER. Munch didn't get to go home again for 10 days. It turned out that she had a UTI, and was too little to safely take antibiotics at home at that point. After she got out, she got a test done that found a mild case of something called Urinary Reflux, or Kidney Reflux. Essentially, the valves at the ends of the tubes that connect her bladder to her kidneys don't work properly, allowing urine to not only flow down from the kidneys, but also back up from the bladder. Any infection she gets in her bladder can rapidly move up to her kidneys as a result. People have lost kidneys and even died because of this. Thanks to Daddy's heat-sensitivity, we'd caught her UTI very early; there was no kidney infection or damage, and she has not gotten another infection since. However, because she's so young and so very susceptible to everything under the sun, she's been kept on a low daily dose of preventative antibiotics ever since.
I hate antibiotics...I'm afraid of them and the horror that their over-use could (and in some hospitals, DOES) mean. I hate needing to give them to my little Munch every morning, and I hate berating myself when I forget a morning. But worse, I hate worrying that missing a day or two will result in a new fever, a new infection, a new trip to the doctor or ER, etc...So I have learned to abide with them as I wait for her to slowly but surely outgrow this issue.
That is the wonderful thing about a mild case of Kidney Reflux. Slowly but surely those tubes lengthen as the child grows, and in most cases it becomes a non-issue. For the rare ones that don't fix themselves, a simple surgery is available. Our urologist highly doubts that we will need to go that route, though, for which I am very thankful. On Munch's first test last year, she was a 1 (the lowest rating out of 5) on one side, and a 3 on the other. Early last week, I took her in for a second test, and today I learned the results from it. The lower side is no longer an issue; it's completely cleared, praise God. The other side has dropped down to a 2. The doctor even gave me the option today to discontinue the antibiotics, since Munch appears to be a low risk for reinfection. Oh how tempting, how very painfully tempting... I would have pounced at it in an instant had I not already known that:
a) any fever she got from now on would absolutely require a doctor visit for a urine check,
b) the last check irritated her skin so much she had a nasty rash for a week,
c) how much friggin' money one of those checks cost, despite insurance, and
d) with the issue technically still not resolved, it's very likely that something WOULD pop up, at least as long as she's in diapers. When she starts potty training, the risk drops considerably. But Murphy's law rules right now, unfortunately. I've seen too many stories on online forums about families who went ahead and stopped the antibiotics before the issue was fully resolved, only to find themselves with a nasty infection a week later.
Amoxicillan is cheap. Dirt cheap, to use the urologist's words. And it *is* peace of mind, at least in this case. It's too low a dose to cause any permanent issues, and too high a dose for those 'bugs' to survive. So it will continue for a little while longer. But methinks potty training might start a little early... ;)
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