Dr. Mom

I may be a worrier, but I'm not when it comes to my children being sick. I assess the symptoms and deal with illness efficiently. Well, that's what I think anyway. I'm sure that I must have let it go to my head when our pediatrician told me I should study nursing because I knew so much already. (Big head alert!)

Super D is my nemesis in situations of childhood illness. Either of our children gets the slightest sniffle, and he wants to rush them to the doctor. He thinks I don't worry enough.

So today, I channeled my inner Super D and took our son to the doctor. He had gone to the school office, complaining of being able to taste blood in the back of his throat, and he said his chin itched. He had no other symptoms, but the look on his face told me all I needed to know. Because of multiple cases of strep throat at our school, I called the doctor and scheduled an appointment. I mean, tasting blood in the back of his throat didn't sound so normal to me.

The 5-minute test was negative, but the doc said his throat was really red with lots of pus. (Pus. Eww.) She said she didn't believe the test. Apparently, they get lots of false negatives - in 20% of the test results, she said. We could wait around two days to send it off to a lab for further testing, but with the pus and all (Eww.) she called it strep and prescribed an antibiotic.

So, in a way, Super D saved the day in this case.