Saturday fun

It's always fun to spend a Saturday afternoon in the emergency room!

We were relieved this morning when Dennis showed no signs of fever, so David left to do a few odd jobs. Dennis spent the morning playing in his room and then watching an Elmo movie, and I heard him crying a bit and thought it was probably time for him to eat his lunch. It had been a few hours since breakfast. I put him in his high chair and gave him some raisins to snack on while I prepared his lunch, and he started shaking/trembling a little, and then he laid his head down on his food. I would have attributed it to exhaustion, but the shaking worried me. So I took him into his room and even though he was plenty cool to the touch, I took his temperature. It was around 103, so while he cried, I frantically packed a diaper bag with necessities and two books, and we headed to the ER here in town. David was an hour away at the time, so I called my mother and she met us there. Dennis was excited to see his Gran even under the circumstances, and it was such a relief to have help distracting him and holding him for the hour and a half we were there.

His temp reached 103.8 when we arrived, and after checking his other vitals and swabbing his throat to check for strep, a nurse gave him tylenol on top of the motrin I'd given him on the way in. He cried his way through his checkups, cried at everything from the heart rate check to the blood pressure check (I have never seen a BP cuff that small!) to the weight and temp checks, and most especially the throat swab and ear checks. He has an ear infection, which I began to suspect, and David has just arrived home from having the antibiotic prescription filled. So we'll start him on that and everything should be fine pretty soon.

On a more positive note, we read Mr. Brown Can Moo and Moo Baa La La La each about 12 times while in the hospital, and Dennis happily identified each animal and made the noises along with us. He also enjoyed a rousing game of "Wheeeeee" on the spinning doctor's seat that was in the room. It could have been much much worse. And now we know why he's had the fever. And now we can get him all better.