It's been a crazy stressful week here. Neal and I had to spend almost an entire week in the hospital because Neal had a fever.
His fever started Friday (7 Sept) night so we took him into the ER. Since he's so young, they ran tests, urine, blood, and a spinal tap, on him and admitted him. It's a minimum of 48 hours usually to see what all of the tests/cultures were doing to make sure Neal didn't have some serious problem. It was so hard to watch them poke him for the tests. I was a mess and wanted nothing more to make them stop hurting my baby. It took a lot of willpower to just sit there and let them do their job. By the time everything was done and we got a room, it was 2 in the morning. Ashton went home to be there for when David woke up (my mom was visiting us at the time, which made everything easier in regards to leaving David). It was a long weekend of vital signs and updates for Neal and I, and going back and forth for Ashton and David. Neal still had a fever off and on, but it was low grade (in the low 100's and 101 at most).
We were hopeful about going home Monday, but the doctor wanted to see this particular test numbers going down and since it wasn't, we had to stay another day. In the meantime, Neal started getting higher fevers. Tuesday, he had 3 high fevers, the highest being 103. The 103 temperature was scary. I was woken up by what I thought was just a hungry baby, which he was, and when I touched him, he was burning hot. I had to call the nurse in to take his temperature and was actually surprised it wasn't higher. The high fever meant another 24 hours in the hospital since they wouldn't let us go home without being fever free for 24 hours. It also meant more tests.
Wednesday was a little better after another scare. The doctor (we saw three different doctors during our stay), decided to stop the antibiotics that they had been giving him since we got to the hospital as a preventive in case he did have a serious virus or bacteria. They thought that maybe the recent fevers were a reaction to those antibiotics. While I was talking to the doctor, Neal was asleep on the hospital bed. After the doctor left, I went to get Neal up. Neal wasn't happy about being disturbed, but otherwise fine. The nurse came in and when I looked back to Neal, seriously a second later, I noticed Neal's eye was swollen closed. A bit freaked out, I showed the nurse and she left to call the doctor. I also noticed that his head was a little misshapen. The nurse came back saying that the doctor was on her way, but had told the nurse to take out the IV. The doctor returned to look at it and reassured me that it was just the IV fluid that had leaked and that it would go away, and my baby would return to normal (I should mention that they had put the IV in Neal's head). Now, the nurses were vigilant about checking his IV for swelling and there was nothing. It happened very fast. After the initial scare, all I could do was shake my head and chuckle. I told Neal that he wasn't allowed to scare me this badly again until he was at least 5 years old. We'll see if he listens.
Neal's temperature returned to normal after this with only one little tiny blip of 100.6. Regardless, the next day, they let us go home and I was very relieved. Like I said, it was one very stressful week. Ashton came to visit us every night during the week, and my mom brought David over in the mornings to see us. It was good to be able to see Ashton and David during this time, but it was much better to be home.
4 comments:
Oh dear! What an experience. So glad to hear that little Neal is doing better!
How scary! I'm so glad that everything turned out ok. I teared up a bit reading about all the tests and wanting to make them stop. That's so hard.
I'm so glad you're home and I hope things are back to normal, whatever that may be! And I'm grateful your mom was there to help -- thanks, Janis!
Yikes! That's sort of thing is so scary while you're in the midst of it. I'm so glad Neal is doing well. Hopefully Neal has met his quota for until he's 5.
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