Oh Great, whooping cough!

[asterroc]

My Dad apparently has whooping cough, and I was apparently exposed to it while visiting for Thanksgiving. Teh intarwebs mentions that vaccination while incubating can stop it, and otherwise you can be sick AND contagious for months, so I'm going to call up my doctor tomorrow and find out if I should get a vaccination.

ETA: Turns out Dad hasn't been diagnosed yet. His doctor has been out of the office for a week (his own daughter's sick), and while Dad has a 103º fever apparently it's not bad enough to yet find another doctor or go to an emergency room... He's been partly self-diagnosing, and partly talking with a friend who is a doctor about it. If either Dad gets an official diagnosis or I experience symptoms I will IMMEDIATELY get myself to my doctor. Whooping cough would put me out of school for up to two months, either b/c I'd feel so crappy, or b/c it's so contagious.

Comments

[sammka.livejournal.com]

*nods* I'm guessing the antibiotics for your HS are targeted, not oral/systemic? It seems from my reading that it doesn't take a really long course of antibiotics to kill off the bacteria, which is hopeful. I agree you still don't want to use them totally unnecessarily, but you might be contagious before you become systematic, so if the diagnosis is confirmed I would personally go right ahead and take the antibiotics.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

The effective HS antibiotics are oral/systemic. I use a topical antibiotic wash in the affected areas as a prophylactic, but I am doubtful as to how well it works. There's no practical way to get antibiotics under the skin, whether during a flare-up or not. I used to use various -cillins (oral) until my staph developed resistance to them all, but it's still susceptible to levoquin (quinalone family) so I take that orally for 7 days.

Recently we're trying NOT using that and instead going for a quick office appointment to get a cortizone shot to treat the inflammation rather than the bacteria that make my immune system decide to do inflammations. The intention is to avoid developing more resistance, especially to something as nasty as levoquin. (They work by messing up DNA, and if I don't drink enough water it will crystalize in my pee. Yay, I get to piss mutants!)