Another ER visit

I’m going to go the lazy route on this update. I’m just going to copy and paste from Dusty’s blog (my dh)

Here is his blog: Different Hats

 

“Samantha is afraid of being forgotten…

… at least that is my working theory behind all of the illness.  It seriously seems as if we’re in the emergency room once a month.  It’s usually between the 13th and 16th and the only conclusion I can draw is this:  She doesn’t want the ER staff to forget her.

When she’s there, laying in our arms looking awful and pathetic, she gets cooed over.  It’s a chorus of comments about what beautiful blue eyes she has.  I think she’s secretly digging it.  Why she is willing to undergo the pain of an IV or blood draws for these compliments is beyond me, but there has got to be some reason.

So obviously Samantha went to the ER last night after our doctor had a chance to give her a once over.  She had been on Amoxicillin for a week and was showing no progress.  The doctor listened to her and stated that she believed that Samantha had pneumonia.  Ugh.  Wonderful!

I was at home watching Addison when I got the tearful call that Samantha had to go to the ER again.  It’s honestly gotten so common that I was really more disappointed than surprised.  I called my mom and asked her to come over and watch Addison so I could get up to the hospital.

Cynthia has been keeping me, and others, updated via her twitter which was, and often is, entertaining.  Call me biased, if you want.  Here is a link that will quickly become less and less relevant to this content due to the fact that she keeps twittering.

URL: http://twitter.com/Cynthia3200

So I finally get up to the hospital and Samantha has already been triaged and Cynthia has changed an ungodly amount of diapers.  Luckily Samantha didn’t waste her whole supply on my wife though, she was happy to share some of that pleasantness with me. 

During our first trip to the Diaper Deck I almost slipped in urine which was fun!  I highly recommend it, if for no other reason than entertainment value.  I let someone at the hospital know and they promptly added a “Caution: Wet Floor” sign, but decided the urine was sterile and thus probably safer than anything else living on that floor and was left to clean itself.

After several hours, we were finally called back and Samantha was taken to an observation room, as opposed to the quick in and out curtain rooms.  She laid still as the doctor took her vitals and at least showed a bit of fight at the anal thermometer.  On a side note: My GOD!  The same stick they put in my mouth has been in other people’s butts with only a small layer of plastic separating the two.  For some reason I assumed it was a separate device.

Eventually several heartbreaking moments had to happen.  We had to restrain our baby girl so she could get blood work.  The nurse sucked too, so she poked around and then moved the needle all around and still couldn’t find anything.  Finally, she called in a specialist who got the job done quickly.  We also had to restrain her while they placed her IV.  And yet more heartbreak when we had to hold her down so they could cath her.  Again our nurse was insufficient and called in the specialist who grabbed a smaller cath line.  I could have grabbed the first nurse by the neck for trying to cath my baby girl with a cath line too large!

I’m still struggling with how I feel about the fact that at the worst of her pain, she would turn her big blue eyes up to me.  I don’t know if those eyes were looking for reassurance, “Dad, what are they doing?  Is this okay?”  or in recrimination, “Dad, how could you let them do this to me?  Why are you just standing there?”  I guess there is comfort in the fact that she’s too young to remember this later but at it would have been nice to know what she was thinking at the time.

So long story a bit shorter, we were sent home with a prescription for Azithromycin.  I picked it up while Cynthia took Samantha home.

And that brings us to today.  I had hoped that the medication would work like a magic bullet of sorts and Samantha would wake up her usual whiny self but morph into our beautiful little smiley mischief making girl, but so far it hasn’t happened.  She got to bed around midnight.  Slept until 10pm, got up for an hour and a half and has been sleeping since.  It’s now 3:25 as I write this.  So she’s 4 hours into her latest sleeping spell.

I can’t wait until our little ones are back at 100%.  I can only take so much worry.  I swear I feel like I haven’t slept in days and I’ve been stealing sleep at every available opportunity.  *Big sigh* Well, this too shall pass – and I, for one, can’t wait! “