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Parenting The Chronically Ill: When Treatment Goes Wrong
The tale of IVIG, Epi and 2 ER’s
Bit has been doing SubQ IVIG (immunoglobulin) for 2 months now. She has tolerated it better than anyone expected her to, it has been amazing. She caught a cold, and was sick for 2 days. It never turned in to pneumonia, we didn’t end up in the hospital, it just…went away.
She was doing so well with the starting dose, the doctors increased her dose by 1 gram, which put her at a weight appropriate dose. I had an abundance of anxiety surrounding her dose increase last week, but the vials came, everyone assured me it would be fine.
It went fine. Then…it didn’t.
Things go from 0 to 100 very quickly in our house. She is either fine or super not fine.
We infused on a Friday like normal, she had hydrated, taken her pre-meds, done all the things she should have. So we sat down, did the 3 sites and waited for the pump to run for it’s time. She did great. There was minimal swelling at the infusion site. Things were good.
Dinner happened. She looked pale, but okay, she didn’t eat all her bacon, which was weird, it’s her second favorite food (after hummus). She got annoyed at me asking every 5 minutes if she was okay, assuring me she was “FINE MOM OMG STOP”.
