Dalton's Journey with Legg Calve Perthes Disease

Dalton's been in a pretty good bit of pain today. This morning first thing he got up saying that his leg hurt and he would cry and his knee would sort of buckle when he tried to put weight on it. He had this cough that kept us up all night and even with two nebulizer treatments and a prescription cough medicine he ended up throwing up...all in our bed...so this morning (after he finally slept from about 4:30am until about 8:30am) he woke up coughing so I took him to the ped. She said his lungs sounded clear so to just treat the cough...but she noticed how badly he was limping and asked about his pain level and everything. She wrote him a presciption for Clonidine and said that it would help him rest and would help his leg not to spasm at night. I pulled the patient info flyer out of the bag from the pharmacy and the only thing that it said it was for was to treat high blood pressure...so I called the pharmacy and they said that they fill the medicine a good bit for children w/ADD or ADHD to help them rest...well the more I have researched it online I am a little nervous about it. In a few instances it talks about an unsafe lowering of blood pressure and heart rate....to the extremes of death in a few children. I am just a little nervous when it comes to medication. Does anyone have any experience with this medicine IN CHILDREN? I would like to at least talk to a couple of people before giving it to him. It's only 0.1mg.

Anyway, after we went to the ped we attempted to run in WM to get our groceries...Dalton was extremely uncomfortable in the buggy...he kept crying and trying to get comfortable but couldn't...so we ended up just leaving after getting deoderant, etc (you know, all the stuff on the non-food side of the store). We did a re-attempt this evening with Dalton in the wheel chair and Hunter pushing him. Sigh....It was an experience...that's the only way I know to describe it. I don't know if any of you have dealt with a child that's going on 3 weeks of prednisone..but it's not pleasant. He is SO irritable and just can't seem to control what he's doing..you can be telling him something over and over and he just can't stop or settle down. It's so frustrating...I don't want to spank him if it's truly something he can't help..but on the flip side I'm afraid he's getting just a tad spoiled by us letting some things slide. It's hard to find a good balance. Even now at 11:40pm he's just now starting to settle down to go to sleep. His leg is uncomfortable and he's so tired that he can't hardly stand himself. Poor babe.

One thing that works awesome is that we now have a Wii and he loves the golf game...it basically requires no leg moving but is good for upper body, as is the boxing game, and several others. We've talked about getting one for a while but went ahead and got one just so he would have something he could do since he can't run around and play. I think it's going to be a great investment, something we can all enjoy as well. LOL We were rocking the house to Disney Sing It earlier. lol I'm sure we were a sight! I can break it down with some Hannah Montanna. hahahaha

So that's the update on us...not much going on...just praying that today was an off day and that it's not starting to be the norm for us.