Sick & Healthy Ro

The week before last, we had the unfortunate experience of having a very sick child on our hands. We had made serious plans for 2 weeks, flying my mom over from India, and we were supposed to be in Canada, on a sans-baby vacation. Then, 2 days before our vacation, daycare called to say we had to pick Ro up because he was running a fever.

MrM brought him home, gave him some Tylenol to control his high temps (at 104 then), at which point Ro fell asleep out of exhaustion. MrM lay down next to Ro and was fortunately there to hold our baby when Ro woke up 2 hours later, having a strong febrile seizure.

Febrile seizures are often non-serious, but Ro had a scary long one which went on for almost 2 minutes with some vomiting. Having no experience with seizures, we called 911 and a really nice lady talked to me on the phone while MrM held Ro. Within 10 minutes (probably less), EMS was here and Ro measured at 105 degrees. He was taken to the hospital where we were told that febrile seizures were common with sudden spikes in temperatures. However, what was not normal was that our baby was not coming around. While most kids are responsive within an hour, ours was listless, moaning, not making eye contact, not recognizing us, and just very ghostlike. After 5 hours, the pediatrician said she had to move on to "plan B" and do a CT scan and lumbar puncture to see if anything was badly off with Ro. Thankfully, both came out okay. Lumbar punctures are horrible and they couldn't sedate Ro properly since they were watching for him to wake up. It was so painful to see him go through the procedure with just some local numbing.

Finally, at 2am, he decided to wake up and his first word was "Pluto" (his favorite stuffie dog). After that it was all fun and games and we went home. Wednesday was fine with Ro having an hour of energy and sleeping through the rest of the day. But Thursday evening Ro started throwing up. Then he kept throwing up everything including water till Friday afternoon. He would say "I lie down on the couch" and fall asleep between pukings. This is how he looked then.

We called his doctor and they wanted us back in ER for his nausea and dehydration, as well as a (possibly spurious) bacterial positive on his blood work from Tue night. He got back at Dell Children's Hospital (amazing facility for kids!) and got some zofran administered intravenously to control the vomiting. An hour later, he got his first taste of Powerade ("blue juice!") and kept it in. They took some more blood samples and we came home.

Ro has been steadily regaining strength since then, although he has become very fragile and sticky over the past few days. On the bright side, I guess it means he loves us extra extra much. Here he is, sitting on his art table next to the window this morning.

My learnings from this ordeal:

• Never watch your kid getting a catheter or a lumbar puncture. Be there, but look away.
• Time every seizure accurately and watch for pale/dark/blue lips
• Time recovery
• Question if a procedure is time critical or can be postponed. I so badly wish we could have held off on that spinal tap (to test for meningitis)

That sums up what we have been dealing with recently, why my vacation got canceled, and why I've been crabby the last few days. But hey, I actually smiled today. Things are finally on an upswing.