One more cup of coffee

Nathan's hospital visit

Nathan's illness got progressively worse over the weekend, and Monday at about noon, Meredith called the doctor's office to see about coming in. He hadn't thrown up since Sunday early morning, but the diarrhea and fever were still going strong. Even water was coming back out as diarrhea within mere minutes of him drinking it. Also, his belly was completely distended. Somehow I didn't think this was from over-eating. The nurse that Meredith talked to listened to the symptoms and said, "go to the ER."

So off to the Emergency Room at Evergreen we went. They drew some blood, hooked him up to an IV (boy, did he love that part), then came back a while later with the exciting news that we would get to spend the night because he was so dehydrated, and needed to be rehydrated via the IV.

Keeping an IV in the elbow of a two-year-old -- even an incredibly lethargic two-year-old -- is not that easy. The night nurse, Jenni, spent a long, long time retaping the IV to keep it in. She figured out how to do it without having to redo the whole IV, though. Yay. By Tuesday afternoon, he had managed to start drinking again and keeping it down, the fever had broken, and they had reduced the IV flow, so the doctor cleared us to go home just before dinner.

With this, his second visit, Nathan has now doubled the trips to the ER that I had as a child. I told him this means he is done. On the other hand, my one childhood visit was caused by my own stupidity (running full speed into a room when I was about 4 without noticing that the wooden door was, in fact, closed); neither of his have been his fault.

The pediatric ward at the hospital is really nice. The rooms are huge, there was a bench that one of us could pretend to sleep on while the other parent pretended to sleep in the bed with Nathan ('pretend' because, really, you can't actually get much sleep when the nurse has to come in about every hour to check on Nathan). They also had a TV and DVD player, and the nurse's station had a DVD library that you could check videos out of. Nathan got to watch a lot of Elmo.

In the end, they think he just had some rotavirus, although they won't know for sure until the results of testing a stool sample come back. (Jobs I'm glad I don't have: trying to collect a stool sample from the diapers of someone with diarrhea as bad as he had.)

The ominous news is that the doctor said we might catch it. Then at work, a friend of mine mentioned that he had had something similar recently, and the doctor told him that it can have a two-week incubation period. So check back in a week and a half or so to see if Meredith and I are still standing.

Posted by Mike at January 26, 2007 07:57 AM