Last week, I finally got the Christmas pictures off the camera. I have so much I should have blogged about (like baby-sitting a newborn!), but let me just tell you what life has been like the last few weeks.
On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (the day before I started keeping Carson), Rylan got a cold. Two weeks later, early Monday morning, he woke up screaming with a 101 degree fever. So I called the doctor as soon as they opened, because cold for two weeks + sudden fever = ear infection, right? Well, as it turned out, that was the first week that they had a full schedule of appointments on Saturday, meaning Monday was going to be extra-booked. I was at the doctor for TWO AND A HALF HOURS. I gave up my spot in line to the woman who should have been after me, because her son was harder to handle than mine and she was anxious about missing work, but even so it would have been a longer-than-two-hour wait to see the doctor. Thank goodness Nanny and Grandaddy watched Jacey; that would have been awful, trying to entertain her AND Rylan for that long.
Anyway, Dr. Haney looked in his ears and said, “I can’t believe I can’t find an ear infection!” I said, “What??” because I just knew that’s what it was.
Oh, no. He had Hand Foot and Mouth Disease. It’s like really bad strep throat, with a 24-48 hour fever, often followed by a rash on the hands and feet. And it’s a virus, so all you can do is treat the fever and wait.
His fever went away on Tuesday night. The rash he got, which was so light you could barely see it on his already-pale-and-pink skin, went from ankles to knees. At least it wasn’t itchy.
Wednesday, Kellen worked out after church. He pulled his shoulder muscle really badly. He could barely help with the kids for a few days; I had to help him make his bed in the recliner so he wouldn’t roll over and hurt himself worse.
Saturday, we went on a youth group trip. Mimi and Gramps watched the kids, and I got a call from my mom at one point saying, “Jacey says her back hurts, and she’s holding her lower left back. Has she said that to you? Maybe she twisted it when she was trying to take off her pj’s this morning…” Having not heard anything like that before, I said I’d keep an eye on her and not worry about it.
Until we were driving home. When we were almost back to church, I got a call from my dad. “Hey, your kid has a fever,” he told me. It went from nothing to 103.9 in no time! So I dropped the kids off at church, stopped by Wal-Mart to pick up children’s Tylenol, having used all of ours earlier in the week on Rylan’s illness, and headed to my parents’ house. By the time I got there, her fever was up to 104.6, and the thermometer actually read 104.9 once. I chose to believe that was a mismeasurement, because that’s .3 degrees less scary.
After a call to the after-hours nurse line at my pediatrician’s number, we ended up at urgent care, expecting a bladder or kidney infection.
We waited five minutes. We were there for two hours.
Poor Jacey Dae screamed and cried almost the whole time we were there. She didn’t want to pee-pee in a cup. She was afraid of the doctor (who was actually not a doctor but a PA or NP; I don’t remember which, and he wasn’t very good with kids. He walked in and said, “Let’s see if there’s a dinosaur in your ear!” and Jacey, no joke, had just told us she was scared of dinosaurs not ten minutes before that. Which doesn’t have much to do with not being good with kids; it was really more about his demeanor, but still, of all the animals for him to pick!). She was sick and scared and hadn’t napped because she was feeling so bad earlier in the day.
Finally, they sent us home with a prescription for amoxicillin for an ear infection and a cup to try to collect a urine sample at home. The doctor/whatever-he-was said the ear infection was “not impressive,” that it was just cloudy and not translucent, meaning it was the beginning of one, and that it shouldn’t cause a fever that high, but that’s all he could see wrong. Jacey was screaming so hard he hadn’t been able to see her throat and hadn’t even mentioned doing a strep or flu test, so I don’t know how he decided that was it.
We were eventually able to get the sample and take it back to urgent care; it was clean. So it was just an ear infection? Except that, 24 hours after starting antibiotics, her fever was still up to 102.4. On Sunday, she started to complain about her teeth, so we wondered if maybe this was an infection from that fateful day at Chick-fil-A.
At 10:00 on Monday, Jacey had her first-ever trip to the dentist. I made Kellen come home from work to help us through this, expecting another urgent-care-like experience. My grandparents kept Rylan. And then, Jacey was amazing. She didn’t cry or whine once. She did just what the dentist and techs asked of her. And we were told that her teeth look perfect. Her gums look a little funny where her teeth were knocked further apart (have I mentioned she has a bigger gap now than she used to?), but there was no reason for a fever.
At 2:30, then, we went to the pediatrician. And she couldn’t find anything wrong except the fever. There was virtually no fluid in Jacey’s ears (no way was it an ear infection). It could have been strep–we couldn’t do a test because she was on antibiotics, but her throat looked fine and if it was strep the fever should have been gone after 24 hours+ on antibiotics. Jacey easily gave a urine sample (she had told me that morning, “Dr. Haney is nice, so I don’t need to cry when we go see the doctor today.” And she absolutely did not; she did everything just like Dr. Haney needed her to), which showed some white blood cells but not enough for such a high fever. The flu test was negative. It could have been Fifth’s Disease, but that results in a rash as the fever clears up, and she never got a rash.
In any case, her last fever was on Monday night. Her appetite is still a little low, and she’s still a bit pale, but other than that, she’s good. We have no idea what was wrong with her. A random virus, I guess, which had no symptoms other than fever?
I got Carson back today, and life was ready to go on as usual. And then I got a migraine from all this stress.
So maybe life will be back to normal tomorrow.
That’s what we’ve been up to these last few weeks. I’m really hoping we got all of our illnesses out of the way for a while.
