Unlucky with New Meds

We were excited on Wednesday after getting Annie's prescription for acyclovir to take prophylactically to help prevent her cankers and drooling.  We gave her the first dose Wednesday night but shortly after she vomited in her bed.  (She always sleeps on chux pads for this reason--and to protect against diaper leaks--but Annie decided to pull the chux away and throw up all over her sheets.)  Anyway, since she does regularly vomit, we didn't think much of the incident).  She slept well that night and was happy the next morning.

Thursday morning I gave Annie her second dose of acyclovir, then left on errands while our nurse was here.  Sure enough, shortly after her dose, Annie vomited again.  We decided that she's just not tolerating the acyclovir, so we're stopping it.  We're a little disappointed since we were really hoping that it could help her cankers.

Annie did well the rest of the day Thursday, but that night, into Friday morning, Annie was throwing up and coughing, gagging, and crying all night long.  She continued vomiting Friday morning.  She was throwing up such large volumes of bile, which isn't normal when she's just vomiting from secretions, so I decided to take her to the pediatrician before the weekend.

After explaining the last several days to the doctor, he agreed the acyclovir wouldn't still be causing the vomiting since we stopped it Thursday morning, but he did point out that because we switched her prophylactic antibiotic for UTIs (from cipro to bactrim) starting Wednesday night, that she might have developed a UTI, especially considering that last year Annie was resistant to bactrim.  So they drew some urine but only got a few drops since they didn't insert the cath far enough, so we'll just have to wait for the culture results in a few days.  In the meantime, we're switching back to the cipro and once we settle the UTI issue, we might try the acyclovir again since maybe all the vomiting was due to the bactrim instead.  So it will be a meds game again for the next little while.  I'm not sure why we thought it would be ok to start two new drugs at the same time.  We definitely won't try that again.