What a week – how quickly things can go from great…to scary…back to normal. Let me try and recap some of the highlights since the last update (when Ms. Riley was kind enough to sleep through the night for the first time).
*I called home after teaching on Thursday evening, and Beth informed me that when she picked Riley up from daycare that she was very warm to the touch, but that they had taken her temperature and she wasn’t running a fever. Along with the heat, she was very much not herself – she wasn’t moving much, smiling, making her ‘talking’ sounds or anything. So Beth took her temp after she got Riley home, and she was up to 101.7. Our pediatrician told us that anything over 100.5 is a fever and that we should call them. Long story shorter…Beth spent some time on the phone with the on-call nurse (who was our liaison with the doctor), she gave Riley her first taste of Infant Tylenol (cherry flavor is not a winner with Riley), and the temp came down to 100.5. By the time I got home from class, Beth was packing up Riley’s things for our first trip to the Emergency Room…
*Since she’s so young, they wanted to check Riley out and make sure that there wasn’t something serious wrong with her…so we went through the joy that is ER admissions; luckily our hospital has a pediatric waiting room and separate area set aside for children and we didn’t have to wait too long to get back to a ‘room’ (more like three walls and 2 curtains for a door). Riley’s temp was staying around 100.5, and now she was starting to get hungry (turns out it’s OK to let her have a bottle – and throughout the whole sickness Riley continued to be a good eater, so dehydration wasn’t a problem – yeah!). Here are some of the highlights from our ER stay:
*Riley had to have blood drawn so they could check for infections and the like (they had to get 2 phlebotomists to find her tiny vein, but luckily they did a great job and got it done on the first time; needless to say Riley did not like them sticking a big needle into her tiny arm;
*Next bit of fun was the catheterization so that they could get a urine specimen; this was more uncomfortable than painful (so said the nurses) and to make things interesting Riley peed around the catheter while they were trying to get the specimen – but they were able to get enough to run whatever tests that they needed;
*The last bit of unpleasantness for Baby Boo was the antibiotic injection – she was definitely not happy to have the ultra-powerful antibiotic shot into her leg; although on the plus side she at least got a Shrek Band-Aid to go over her owie; on another more positive note – we discovered that Riley seems to like grape Tylenol much more than the cherry flavor and we now have 2 bottles of grape medicine for the future.
About 2:30 or so Friday morning, they finally said that we could take Riley home and for us to see the pediatrician as soon as we could on Friday. Her temp was still over 100 on Friday, but it started coming down during the day and they went ahead and gave her another shot of antibiotic on Friday afternoon. When we got to our Saturday Dr. visit she was down to 97.something (I can’t remember the little details – sue me) and her cultures from the urine and blood came back negative. So the best the pediatricians can figure she just had a little virus – not a urinary tract infection or anything more serious like that.
Whew – what a way to end the week. We were able to go out as a family on Saturday night and had a nice dinner with Beth’s Mom, her Grandfather & his wife and more of the family. Riley was back in ‘cute baby’ form and impressed everyone by how well she can stay asleep even while being passed around between different people. New pictures are on the way – I promise – and they should be up and linked to later on Sunday. Here’s hoping that the coming week is a bit less dramatic and exciting than this past week!
Update [10/15/06 – 8:00 PM] – new pictures available online here!