A Sick Baby, a Bum Toe, and a Six Pack

Some people reach for a 6-pack when they are stressed. Corona, Beer...what have you. Quite contrary, my 6-pack comes in a clear plastic container. Filled with 6 fluffy, white cakes nicely decorated with gobs and gobs of frosting.....

Chase is finally getting better. I took him to the Dr. today for a follow-up from our ER visit and he got a good report. Just a bad stomach virus on it's way out. And don't bother coming back, thank you very much! Now mommy's bum toe on the otherhand. Now that's a different story. Perhaps one that I will share later.

So, there we were, driving to my husband's parents home, 4 hours away. Chase slept like the little angel sleeper he is-the entire 4 hours. Leighton took a much smaller nap and sadly his
DVD player was "boken". OK, just out of batteries. But we told him it was broken and that daddy had to fix it. So every 10 miles or so, Leighton would say, "daddy, daddy, did you fick (fix) Baby Eintein yet?" And daddy would say, "no Leighton, we have to wait till we get to Grandpa's to fix it". Press repeat on that for about 2 hours.......

When we got there, I was hoping Chase's fever had gone down. He had started a slight one before we left and we figured if he was uncomfortable in the car at all, we would turn around. Plus, the grandma's love baby-holding so we had that on our side.

Well, he turned out a little sicker than we thought. His fever was going up close to 102 all night. Diarehha up the waz-oo, literally. Seriously though, my poor little punkin face was so miserable. I was up all night with him in the chair with little bursts of sleep. Derrick was wrangling Leighton in the bedroom all night. He kept waking up from the train and crying to come to bed with him.
It was a long one.

By 7:30 his fever was still bad so we took him to the local clinic. And that was a disaster! It started off with 3 people being called in in front of us. My husband getting quite angry went to talk to the register people. Turns out the problem was this. They couldn't print a piece of paper that had our name on it. So we could not go back to see the doctor without the paper. Really? My sick 2 month old is miserable and you can't just write our name down and call it good? So after my husband got a little cranky with them, they were able to figure it out. That was only the first of many malfunctions at that clinic.
2. broken scale
3. broken thermometer (really???? are you serious? yes. i am serious)
4. broken pulse-ox-imiter (that's the pronunciation) and it measures blood oxygen levels (very important in little babes)

After all that broken stuff, we did see the doc and got the diagnosis. Negative for Influenza A&B and RSV. Phew. Positive for bronchiolitis. She told us he was pretty sick and we would need to watch him very closely.

We decided if he did get sicker, we wanted to be back home with our well-established medical faciltities close at hand. Which we used. After another night of no sleep for Chase or mommy or daddy. And continued diahrea and high fever which was unable to be controlled by Tylenol. By 5am on Sunday morning we decided I would take my babe to the ER. Which turns out to be a pretty slow time over there and I would highly recommend it over a 3 hour wait during other times of the day.

Well, after a chest x-ray, a urine sample (not fun) and 3 blood draws-for which I may still go back and punch the one guy in the face....acutally punching in the face wouldn't even be restitution.....i'm thinking more like dig a needle into his arm for a LONG time trying to find a vein and then having to have someone else come and do it and being really crabby while i do that.

Anyway, good news was, everything bad was ruled out. Including bronchiolitis. Turns out the other doc was wrong and he didn't need an antibiotic either. Just a really bad virus running it's course. I was really relieved to find out it wasn't one of the flu's and that he was going to be ok. His temp actually dropped a few degrees in the ER and never got over 100 that day.

Sunday was still a rough day but mommy was able to calm down a bit after knowing he was going to be OK. Last night, he actually slept most of the night. Except for that one time. He cried and I went to get him. In the pitch dark. Dumb idea. Stubbed my already bum toe into the papisan chair on the floor. Stubbed it hard. And this may or may not lead to a future post about my bum toe.

....now i think I'll get back to enjoying my 6-pack.