(translation "Poor Girl" in French)
Our poor poor sick girl. She's sick. Today she's doing much better - which means she's playing on the floor, crawling on us in bed (when she wakes up before us), and fighting taking naps. Ahh, mostly back to normal, but she's still definitely sick.
It all started on Thursday night. I nursed little E to bed. Halfway through the night I woke up to a very warm (but asleep) baby. "Hmm, I wonder if she has a fever? When she wakes up, maybe I'll check." Of course, having thought that, she immediately woke up and started crying. A diaper change and temperature reading later (the "hard" way - rectally - eck), we knew she must be sick. 103+. So then we cracked open all our Baby First Year's books and consulted its pages for what to do. But it was so odd, she was so happy and playing on our bed and it didnt' seem to bother her at all. So, the advice was just to keep her cool, give her meds and watch her behavior. We gave her a little tylenol and all went back to bed (Of course, that's after she played a bit, was rocked a bit and nursed back to sleep.)
Then Friday. Her temperature seemed to go down. It was still high, but not as high as in the middle of the night. We worked, she played, we held her a lot. "Hmm, maybe it was just a one day bug." As we got to the end of the day, her temperature started to rise. "Maybe not". But it was time for bed... so, a bath, some books, more tylenol and an attempt to nurse her off to bed. I say attempt because well she didn't sleep very well. Even after she had "dozed off" in bed, she kept turning and thrashing (with her eyes close) and grunting for a couple of hours. And if I tried to move away or get up, she'd instantly pop her head up awake and cry. Erggg. "Maybe if I feed her again and try the whole getting to sleep process again." But that didn't work... at 1am, she ate, she fell asleep for maybe 5 mintues, then she coughed, then she gagged and threw up all over me and the bed. Yikes. It was probably because she was so hot. (She was burning, her hands and feet felt like little heaters and her core body was almost hot to the touch. Wow, that's HOT.) We gave her a tepid bath (all the medical books and advice about infant fevers say "tepid", who knew it was a technical term) to cool her off and also to wash all the milk off her and me. Then we rocked and held her a lot. Finally she fell asleep, but in our arms. Hmm... we realized she was NOT going to sleep... at least not in bed. So instead we took turns holding her - an hour of me holding her while sitting in the recliner, an hour of Ian holding her while sitting in the recliner, 1.5 hours of me holding her while sitting up in bed, 1.5 hours of Ian holding her while sitting up in bed. Finally we got her to lie down and sleep on the bed (not in our arms) just as the sun was coming up.
Then Saturday. We left early in the morning to go out. She seemed a bit cooler (still up at 101ish though) and a bit happier (after gettng some sleep and also probably because we were outside - distractions!). We planned to call the clinic and get an appointment with the on call doctor. E seemed okay... a little warm... but overall happy. You could tell she was sick though, very lethargic (especially for her), eyes with big dark bags under it and a slightly glazed look. At about lunch time we finally called, remembering that we probably didn't want a repeat of last night at home. The nurse said that the clinic was closed (we thought it was open past noon, we were wrong) and also asked up to take her temperature. We were surprised... 103.4!! And she didn't even feel that hot. So we decided we'd take her into the clinic the next morning before it closed at noon and made an appointment.
(Ian now writing the rest of this...)
That night she slept a little better and in the morning we took her into the clinic for her appointment (thus skipping church, obviously). The doctor on call there had a look at her and thought that she might have an ear infection, though it wasn't very clear. So she prescribed some amoxycilin (an antibiotic) and we went and picked that up. E pretty much slept the rest of the day and all through the night with only an hour here and there of any kind of wakefullness, her little body trying to recover from her sickness. The next day, she vomited twice all over everything but didn't do that anymore after that. But she did develop a bad rash that got worse and spread out all over her body. Gilda called the clinic (it was after hours, though, so we couldn't take E in just then) and made an appointment for the next day (or maybe she made the appointment Tuesday morning - I can't remember) since apparently a rash can be a sign of an allergic reaction to amoxycilin and can be pretty serious - the lit with the bottle said to see a doctor immediately in cases where a rash develops.
So now we had an appointment for the next day in the evening. E was now feeling better and acting more like her old self and sleeping at night like her old self. The next day she seemed fully recovered except for the fact that the rash, which covered almost her whole body, head to toe, looked a little worse. I went to class to give my students their midterm and we had a fairly normal day. At the appointment, the doctor there said that it was likely not an ear infection that E had had but rather something viral and it was likely that her rash was the final stages of that rather than a reaction to the antibiotics - either way, though, she was going off the antibiotics in any case. After all, the rash didn't even bother at all, like an allergic rash normally would.
Oh, and on top of all that, Gilda has had some stomach/intestinal not-so-funness the past week. In the past week, I'm the only one that hasn't suffered any illnesses in our little family (yet)!
