My son, who has had seasonal allergies for the past few years, came home sniffling a couple weeks back.
We didn’t react: after all, he’s only recently started to be substantially free of seasonal allergy symptoms, and so we thought that perhaps something had triggered an allergic reaction. He complained of sore legs but he’s a boy and growing at an astounding speed – “growing pains” were not out of the question. I watched him – but he didn’t develop a fever. So, I was sympathetic but firm. He had to go to school.
He’s a good kid, so he went.
Then my daughter started complaining about not feeling well. Her tummy hurt; her legs were tired. I figured she might just be imitating her big brother – after all, at age three it is a common strategy to mimic what your older brother (or sister) is doing.
Once she started throwing up, I knew that the flu had likely been a visitor for at least a week or so, and that the youngest one had the worst case of it. After a few sleepless nights, I’m finally sleeping again. Happily, it was just a regular bout of flu and no big deal. (After all, we’re all still on the alert for swine flu.)
When your child has seasonal allergies, you can’t react to every sniffle. You’d be crazy in no time flat. Instead, you enter the zone called “maintenance”. If it’s not too bad, you start to expect your child to tough it out. If it’s serious, you break out the arsenal: puffers, other remedies, antihistamines. But I find that many parents – myself included – get tired of the cycle of drugs and we begin to try to reduce the amount of it that we use.
While we’re doing that, we can be confused by symptoms that are very similar to allergies – but aren’t. This is why I missed my son’s flu bug. Unfortunately, that means that he spread his bug around his classroom. It also meant I didn’t enforce the highest level of hygiene (which usually starts as soon as someone seems to be getting sick.) That’s probably why his sister got so sick. She got what he had – she just got a more serious case of it.
Which brings us back to allergies – how the heck do you tell the difference between allergies and a cold or flu? If you need a quick review, check out our article on that very topic. I’ll be re-reading it too.
