Trauma #1

Well we knew it was bound to happen sooner or later.....that dreaded question you ask yourself when your child gets sick and the doctor's office is closed. Do we make the trip to the ER or are we overreacting? We consider ourselves fortunate that this is the first time we have had to deal with this. By this time with my niece Emmy, my brother had made this trip at least 1/2 dozen times.

Anyway, Jackson's babysitter called Friday afternoon and told us he woke up from his nap with a fever of 103. Of course I freaked out but she said she thought he had gotten hot from his nap because his fever was down to 100.5 within 1/2 hour. John said he was fine on the way home but the minute he saw me he burst into tears. His fever was 100.7 and although I'm told that's not high for a baby I was still worried. I thought maybe it could be teething but wasn't really sure about that, and what if it was more serious, so we went over to Cook's trauma center. I highly recommend that for anyone with kids. We got in fairly fast and got excellent care.

The doctor checked him all out, ears were clear, throat wasn't red so they decided to take blood. That was heartbreaking. A paramedic and a male nurse had to hold him down while the phlebotomist tried to draw the blood from his right arm (I stupidly thought they would take it from his heel). She couldn't find a vein and I was getting frustrated watching her dig that needle around in his arm, he's screaming of course, so I think I said something like "how bout you take that out of his arm and try something else". I'm sure she wasn't too happy but I've had that happen before and it hurt me and I'm an adult, not a 9 month old baby. So the paramedic tried in his left arm and managed to find the vein quickly. Poor baby, he had to go through getting stuck twice..... but what do you do, they needed to determine whether he had an infection since the cause of his fever wasn't obvious. He screamed so much during that ordeal that he wore himself out and fell asleep in my arms while we were waiting for the results. The paramedic was so nice, he later told us he has a 16 month old.

The doctor said his white blood cell count was extremely low which signals he has a virus of some kind. She said a stomach virus was going around so expect him to probably start throwing up over the next couple days. So ok, we weren't looking forward to that but at least we knew what it was and we weren't sitting at home wondering what we should do for him. One of the other kids at the babysitter had a stomach virus last week but never ran a fever.

Since Friday he has run a fever anywhere from 99.5 to 100.7 but that's pretty much all that has happened, other than he is really tired. He'll be crawling across the floor and just lay his head down on the floor. Saturday and Sunday morning both he laid in my lap and watched a Dora video and fell asleep on and off. He never snuggles like that so he must be feeling bad. Other than the fever he hasn't had anything else wrong. He actually seems to feel better today so we're hoping we made it without going through the bad stuff. So I probably overreacted on rushing him to the doctor and I'm sure that won't be the last time. Jackson seems to play a little rougher everyday so before we left I did ask them if they did stitches there.......those of you with boys, they do!

We thank God there wasn't anything seriously wrong with Jackson. All I could think about after they took blood from him was I don't know how parents of critically ill children do it. I can't imagine having to watch your child undergo painful medical procedures on a regular basis.

I forgot to mention that we had plans to go out Friday night for John's birthday, which is today. My friend Teri was going to come over and watch Jackson for us after her daughter's christmas party at her dance studio. And we offered to let her son, Drew hang out with us instead of going to a party with a bunch of girls. Unfortunately he got stuck going to Cook's with us and was such a good sport. We tried to make up for it when we got home with pizza and video games but he'll probably tell his mom to wait in the driveway next time she brings him over just to make sure we're not going to drag him to another hospital!