8 Day Stay

We ended up staying in the hospital for 8 days. It was a huge suck fest.

On Friday I woke up and my ear hurt like a bitch, I had a 102.7 fever and was shaking uncontrollably. The hubster took me to the doctor and I had an ear infection so bad it was bleeding inside, my uterus was infected and one of my boobs was in the early stages of mastitis. I got loaded up on antibiotics and started feeling better. I had a chat with the doctor about Nash and how he seemed like he was getting sick too. She said to keep an eye out for a fever, cough, etc.

He got a cough but no fever. I decided Sunday to just go ahead and take him to the walk in clinic. We waited forever for a clearly overworked doctor who was short with me and not very friendly. After taking blood from my baby she decided to prescribe him antibiotics. He was only 8 days old at the time and the prescription was for 1 teaspoon of antibiotic three times a day. Wow!

I got to the pharmacy and the pharmacist was very concerned about the dosage of this antibiotic and why an 8 day old would even need antibiotics. This made me paranoid so I called the on call doctor at the office and she said that it seemed like way too much and he should only have a quarter teaspoon every 8 hours. I was fuming mad that she would overprescribe my baby meds! I could not believe it. What if I hadn't had other kids and knew that seemed like a lot or if I had a pharmacist who wasn't paying attention and just filling prescriptions? I could have made him pretty sick.

This made me way paranoid that she missed other important things in regard to my baby's health so I took him to the ER. They said he seemed fine but they would suction him out and check for RSV. He tested positive for RSV and said due to his age it would require a mandatory 24 hour hospital stay, but the hospital was completely full of kids with RSV, pneumonia and flu so we would have to go to the children's hospital downtown. He said I could drive him myself because he was in pretty good shape.

Then it all went downhill.

They double checked his oxygen and it was in the low 70's so they hooked him up. He was either screaming or zoning out. He looked terrible. They said he needed to be transferred by ambulance. A new doctor came in and touched him on his fingers and chest and then ordered an IV in immediately. I started getting a little panicked. They came in to do his IV and he was screaming. I started crying a little in the corner. All of  sudden his screaming stopped and alarms were going off on the monitor and one of the nurses said "he's bradying, get the doctor now" and they started rubbing his chest. I did the best thing I could, which was begin to bawl my eyes out. All the commotion, plus the alarms, plus my baby not making a sound was the worst moment I think I have experienced in a really long time. The nurse asked if he had ever had a chest xray and I tearfully said no and then thought of heart defects he could have that we didn't know of yet. Luckily the brady was probably just from low oxygen and stress.

They got him settled and I fed him a little and he passed out. The poor baby was traumatized to the max. Finally the ambulance got there. I listened as the nurse gave the EMT's the rundown and what they should do if he had a brady again on the way down.

At 3:30 a.m. we arrived at the downtown Children's Hospital. At that's about all. There isn't much you can do for RSV so they hooked him up to oxygen and we began oxygen level watch, which lasted eight seriously long days. On the fourth and fifth night my mom did hospital duty and we celebrated Christmas with the twins. On the seventh day I went batshit crazy on the medical staff and an idiot social worker they called in to deal with me, so Hubby stayed with him and I got some sleep. On day eight, we brought baby home!

I am normally dirty and proud, not paranoid at all, but I have hardly left the house with him. Only to the doctor. I'm the hand washing Nazi. I really don't want to ever do that again. So that's the story. Not cool, but thankful it was only a virus and nothing more serious.

Making cookies for Santa on the 28th!

Little buddy all hooked up to all his stuff!