Not the Weekend We Wanted

So, this week has been terribly busy, including a three day trip for me to NY, for a deal that was supposed to close Thursday and has not yet, as of Sunday night, closed, which is horribly anti-climactic. But I will talk about that trip more later. Right now I want to discuss the events of today.

We got up and got Caetlin to her yoga class this morning. Bruce had to be her yogi this morning, as I injured my back a few days ago and remain on the mend and unable to move around too quickly. When Bruce got Caetlin dressed, he noticed that she had vomited at some point during the night, but hadn't cried out enough to wake us. It was all over her jammies and the sheet, but it wasn't in her hair or anything, so apparently she slept in the clean part of the bed after it had happened. Poor kid.

We kind of kept an eye on her during her yoga class, and while she seemed generally normal, we both concluded that she wasn't quite herself. After the class, we went to the mall to walk around- exercise is recommended in healing my back but I'm not supposed to walk on any hills. We thought the mall would work just fine, and with it being closed, if Caetlin wanted to walk around, she could do that too. We popped her in the stroller and started, well, strolling. Caetlin seemed unusually content to hang out in the stroller, rather than asking to walk, but we figured it was part of her not feeling well.

After 2 circuits around the mall, we looked down to check on her in the stroller- she was really being quiet. And that's when we realized she was having a seizure.

Bruce grabbed her and I called 911. We went downstairs to wait for the ambulance with the security guards, and laid her out on a table to try to make her comfortable. She seemed to wake up a little but then was trying to fall asleep, and then she had another small aftershock kind of thing. A random doctor came over to look at her, and he recommended that we cover her up, since she seemed cold, despite her now-apparent fever.

It was all kind of a blur. We've done this before, of course, twice, and I can't say what is worse: holding my burning up 6 month old, or my screaming 9 month old, or my thrashing toddler. Or seeing any of them strapped to the gurney in the ambulance.

I rode with her in the ambulance, and after they ministered to her (vitals and a Tylenol suppository), she slept, worn out from her spiking fever and the seizure. She woke up when we got to the hospital; Bruce met us there in the car. There was poking and prodding and screaming, and the doctor saw us pretty quickly. We all agreed that the seizure was a febrile seizure, and that we were more concerned with finding the underlying cause of the fever. A nurse catheterized her long enough to take a urine sample, and it took forever to get her calmed down from that.

Finally, they left us, and she screamed and cried, trying to sleep and lacking pacifier and blanket. Bruce went home to get these necessaries, and she ended up putting herself to sleep sometime later before he got back. We waited and waited, and finally they let us go with an admonishment to treat the fever, see the pediatrician in a couple of days and follow up on the urine culture. Her ears and throat were clear, so the main concern is a urinary tract infection. This is especially bad news for her, because she's on prophylactic antibiotics specifically to prevent a UTI. She may need surgery if she has a UTI now, breaking through the antibiotics. We'll know in a couple of days.

She came home and fell asleep for almost three hours and woke up smiling and laughing and with a huge appetite, having not had proper breakfast or lunch today. She went back to sleep two hours later, after a bath and some stories.

It was awful, and scary, and even worse because it came so out of the blue. She seems okay now, but I grow to hate the hospital, with its cheerful bright paint colors and its Elmo videos on TVs that have no sound.

My biggest complaint, after we calmed down a bit and the adrenaline drained out, was the nurse (trainee?) who came in after we were waiting for her urinalysis results, and after Caetlin had fallen asleep. She needed to take Caetlin's vital signs, and damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead, she was going to wake the baby. And wake her she did, with a cold stethoscope against the poor sleeping baby's back. Caetlin of course started to scream, and began asking for water. We asked the nurse (?) if she could have some, and the nurse (?) said she would have to ask Caetlin's head nurse. And then she calmly continued attempting to take vitals, while my child sobbed for water, and she assured us that she was about to ask, and about to ask, all the while fucking around with the goddamned underarm thermometer. Finally Bruce said, "Who do I need to ask? I'll do it," and tore out and got immediate permission. The nurse(?) seemed to realize she had maybe done something wrong; she was all, "I hate to be mean, but I have to take care of this."

I was too nice to her; I told her I understood that she has a job to do. But in reality I was furious. I still am. Her fucking respiration and temperature could have waited. It could have waited until she woke up, and if she had to wake her up, she could have had the decency to go find out whether the poor kid could have the water she was so pitifully begging for, instead of just plodding along putting the cover on the thermometer like a fucking cow.

I get that vitals need to be charted. I really, really do. My mom was a nurse for many years, and it is a process with which I am familiar. It just seemed like a little later might have done. And to ignore the poor child's requests for water- what kind of brainless twit do you have to be? The nurse was 20 feet outside the door, not half a mile away.

So that was my day, today. My child sleeps soundly in her bed now, with her jammies on and a full belly. It was not exactly the Sunday I had hoped for.