When Tiny Babies Have a Fever

You get sentenced to 48 hours at Children's Hospital with IV antibiotics pumping into a tiny, taped up, flipper hand.

Monday morning Luke seemed a little off, then he went 4 hours without nursing and promptly threw up on me after he did nurse. I took his temperature then and it was normal. A few hours later, it was 100.3 so I called the doctor. They worked us in within the hour. I packed a diaper bag for him and a couple of diapers for Ella, expecting to be told it was a virus and sent home to nurse, nurse, nurse and keep and eye on him until it ran its course.

Imagine my surprise when the doctor (not our regular doctor) told me we needed to go straight to the ER at Children's so he could have the full bloodwork done. It looked like he might have an ear infection, but because of his age (12 days), they couldn't make that assumption without checking for more serious causes - like meningitis and bloodstreem infections. Yikes. He had called ahead and the ER doctor was expecting us.

In a state of shock, with 2 diapers for my two year old who was wearing flip flops that hurt her piggy toes and the crap umbrella stroller I keep in my car for just such occasions, we were on our way downtown. I worked hard to keep my composure while letting my family know and explaining to EGR that we were indeed going back to the hospital because Luke was sick. After I had assured her, that very day, that I didn't have to go back to the hospital.

At 4:30 in the afternoon, they took us right into a room in the ER and that's where I learned that a full work up means: blood work (after squeezing vials of blood from Luke's already pricked and bruised heels), urinanalysis (after a catheter), and a spinal tap. And, oh, by the way, "when we do all of this, we go ahead and admit them for 48 hours to run IV antibiotics while we wait for the blood culture to grow."

I cried with him as they poked and prodded and squeezed out his blood because it's just physically impossible for me to sit there and listen to him cry like that without doing something. I left the room when they did the spinal tap and took that opportunity to tell Ella goodbye. She spent the night with Grandmother so that Dave could go home to pack me a bag and bring it back to me.

The preliminary bloodwork came back negative for any sort of infection, so we knew before we were admitted that it was most likely viral, but they started his IV and sent us to a room to wait for the culture to grow. Overnight, his fever went up to 102.6 and I was so very thankful to already be at the hospital when that happened. At 24 hours, the blood culture was negative but we still had to wait another 24 hours to make absolutley sure there was no bacterial infection. In that time, his fever went up and down and I had to work to get him to nurse. By the 48 hour mark he was much more himself, and the culture was still negative so we were released with the tiny baby dosage for Tylenol and Mylicon (the antibiotics really upset his stomach).

Now we are home, and though he still smells like the medicine they pumped into him, he is doing amazingly better. He ate and slept and woke up normally. He may have only been home for a week, but he knows that home is way better than Children's Hospital. I, myself, was so happy to take a shower and sleep on a bed that I was nearly giddy.

The EGR Update
Dave and I thought that the second night I was at the hospital with Luke would be a good time for Ella to stay home with him and go through the whole supper, bath, bedtime routine without me. We talked and talked to her about it and I'm excited to say it went off without a hitch. Well, only a minor hitch - there were crickets chirping outside her room so she was scared to sleep in there, but she slept the whole night through in bed with Daddy. There was no crying at bedtime. No self-induced vomiting. I'm so proud of both of them. I had a good feeling that if I wasn't physically in the house, she and Dave could work out bedtime without any problems and they did. He was very excited about it, too. They were both glad when we got home yesterday, and when I tucked Ella into bed last night, she didn't even stay awake through her bedtime prayer. She's still a bit worried and asking "What is wrong with 'uke?" but she has generally been a trooper through the mayhem that was the last 2 weeks of our lives.

Thanks to our family and friends that prayed for us; I'm so very grateful.