As I mentioned in an earlier post, we were all sick during our first missions conference. This proved rather challenging for a variety of reasons, which I'm sure you can imagine. Here's the "rest of the story".
Thursday afternoon I was in the ER with Dawson. He was diagnosed with an ear infection and a possible staph infection on one of his sucking fingers. The spot looked just like a pimple, but was very pink and swollen. Because of this he was put on Augmentin.
Within two days he had diarrhea. The dr. had warned me of this, so I wasn't surprised. By Wednesday it was so severe I was changing 5, 6, 7, poopy diapers a day. Wednesday evening he refused to eat dinner. Early Thursday morning he began vomiting and would still not eat or drink, except to nurse. Thursday evening his dr. told me to take him off the Augmentin. Friday morning he threw up again, shortly after he nursed. I called the dr. and told the nurse I thought we were very close to dehydration as his diaper was barely wet after the 12 hr. night. I took him in at 9:30 to discover he had lost one pound in two days. They admitted him to the local hospital immediately.
The nurse instructed me to measure all his wet and dirty diapers. At this point all we were getting was dirty, and they only weighed 2 and 3 ozs. They tried to put in an IV, but were unsuccessful. The phlebotomist then came in to draw blood to check for dehydration and a couple other things. They were trying to rule out rotovirus and C-diff (something that can occur when a person has been on anti-biotics). They needed a stool sample, but couldn't get anything able to be sampled. Finally the anesthesiologist had to put the IV in. Even he had a difficult time, so my poor baby ended up with eight or so pokes on both arms and hands. He finally got it in, but in the hand with his two favorite "put-myself-to-sleep" fingers.
After a couple hours with the IV, Dawson began to perk up and play. Then we began to get nice, wet diapers that tipped the scale much better than before. Friday night we got a good stool sample they could use for testing. I finally got him to eat about a jar of baby food and to drink a few sips of Pedialyte. By Saturday morning he was back to his cheerful self, the vomiting was over, and the diarrhea was subsiding. He ate nearly a whole piece of toast for breakfast and had gained back a pound.
They discharged him around lunch time. I was still a little nervous because he wasn't eating and drinking very well, but over the next five days or so he gradually began eating again. It almost seemed as if he was wary of the foods he had been eating when he was sick. He is just now taking an interest in Cheerios again this many weeks later. He still won't eat much banana, which he used to polish off quickly. We've been introducing some new foods to help compensate for his aversions.
Overall the experience went as well as could be hoped. There were some blessings along the way. First, because he was still nursing, the hospital provided free meals for me. This not only saved us money, it also saved me the trouble of needing to go find food, leaving him alone in the room. All of the nurses were very nice. The one we had for about half of the stay is a pastor's wife, so we were able to chat together as sisters in Christ. That was a nice blessing. Also, my mom wasn't working that day (even though she originally was supposed to) so she was able to watch the boys while Jason was at work. And of course we were thankful to find out he did not have any of the things they were testing for and he gradually recovered as the antibiotic got out of his system.
Hopefully this experience is one we will not have to repeat!
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