Coughs, cough swabs and kicking an infection in the butt 🦠

This week we had the 💩 news that the cough swabs we did at Arlo’s last clinic have shown moderate growth of haemophilus parainfluenzae - this means he has cultured another bacteria.

In December he cultured staphylococcus bacteria and required extra flucloxacillin antibiotics to clear it.

This time round we are on 3 rounds of co-amoxiclav - as well as maintaining his prophylactic flucloxacillin. Poor sausage!

As a parent you tend to monitor and over analyse everything - is my baby getting enough sleep, is he eating enough, developing as he should etc. etc.

But I know all the CF parents out there will agree with me when I say that by far the thing I spend most of my time worrying about is Arlo’s coughs.

When he was first diagnosed, his paediatrician warned me about this. He said, “you’ll probably worry about every single cough Arlo has for the first year or so but you will eventually work out when a cough needs to be seen by us and when it is a regular baby cough.”

The general rule they gave us is that if it is a “wet, productive and persistent” cough then it should be checked out and will likely require antibiotics.

So this is basically an example of my internal monologue on a regular basis:

“Was that a baby cough or a CF cough?”

“That’s his 3rd cough this morning. So that seems persistent right?!”

“Was that a wet cough?”

“Now THAT one sounded productive? Did it? Do you think?!?”

The key thing is to jump on any signs of an infection as quickly as possible and get him on antibiotics that will kill the bacteria.🦠 This is where it gets fascinating (I think so anyway) - when the cough swab is taken, it gets sent to the laboratory at Arlo’s hospital and if a particular bacteria is detected, they test antibiotics on that exact bacteria from Arlo’s lungs to make sure that they are then prescribing the right antibiotic to kill it. 🤯

So the bad news is that Arlo has another infection. But the good news is that we caught it and we are now armed with the antibiotics we need to fight it.

So let’s go my little CF warrior! 👊👊👊👊

You’ve got this babe!👶💙👶💙👶💙