Sick Baby!!

What an eventful week!!! On Monday I took AnnaLyn to the doctor because she had a fever and a yucky cough. Croup. She didn't get any better as the week went on, and in fact got worse. So, we went back on Thursday afternoon. Pneumonia and dehydration. To hospitalize or not to hospitalize....that is the question. We decided to go with a shot of strong antibiotics, but if she didn't improve within a few hours and at least start drinking, we'd have to go back. She didn't. Our options, said the doctor on call, were to go to the ER, or try giving her a teaspoon of liquid by syringe every 5 minutes. We went with that option......for 10 minutes. Then we went to the ER....at 9pm. It was crazy there. Doesn't anybody just go to the doctor?? Nobody there looked really sick. Well, there was this one girl who was crying and said she had a headache and she couldn't move her neck. Scary. I let her go ahead of me. But besides her, nobody else looked like they were really in an emergency situation. Then there was my babygirl...with a fever of 104 and as lethargic as she could be. We waited for 2 hours in the waiting room. They admitted her into the hospital immediately, but we still had to wait forever. We didn't get to a room until 1:30am, and then they still had intakes to do. We didn't go to sleep until 3am. They started an IV. Stuck her 5 times. Finally got one in her foot. She was so sick that by the 2nd time they stuck her, she just laid there and didn't even cry. Then they had to cathererize her to get a urine specimen. (She'd only had 1 wet diaper in 24 hours). They had to do it twice, because the first nurse couldn't get the catheter in. UGH!! The next day our doc came in and said she was growing some staph in the blood culture they had taken yesterday. Turns out it is MRSA. Not the nasty strain that is killing people, but MRSA just the same. We stayed in the hospital until Sunday morning, then the doc sent us home on some more super strong antibiotics. She's doing well. Coughing, sleepy and grumpy, (Isn't that 3 of the dwarfs??) but she has kept her fever down and she is playing a little more. She's eating more, but I still can't get this girl to drink a thing! Did you ever try to make a 2 year old drink something?? You don't know the fun you're missing my friend! On a funny note, the bed they gave me to sleep in at the hospital was a pressure relieving air matress. That was exciting. The thing inflated and deflated at will...all night long. I'd be sleeping so soundly (between AnnaLyn coughing and nurses coming in) and all of a sudden my butt would be going up in the air. A couple of times I was sure it was gonna blow. (The matress, not my butt.) One night a gremlin must have gotten into the mechanics of the thing because the whole frame started moving on it's own and I wound up standing on my head at a 45 degree angle. I couldn't figure out how to fix it, so I just finally swapped ends of the bed. Chris figured it out for me the next day. It really is fun to be me. you just never know what's going to happen next. Oh well, until next time......