4 days of puke & poop, and 4 hours in the ER

sooo if you were following the crazy sick trail i documented over the last couple days in my previous entry….i left off waiting to hear from luke’s doctor’s office. it was actually luke’s doctor on call and i wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. we haven’t had the best experiences with her. i spoke with a nurse who took down all the info and offered up her own advice, but after hearing how MUCH he was still puking and pooping she decided to call the doctor and see what she’d want to do.

so she did, called me back, aaand she wanted us to take him to childrens. 
(as in, childrens hospital, for those of you who don’t live around here)

neither of us have ever been there, so we had no idea where to go or what to expect. we googled directions, packed up a ton of extra clothes and towels and bags in the event of being puked on (which seems to be luke’s preferred place to puke – on someone), and off we went. the waiting room wasn’t entirely slammed, but there were enough sick kids to make me hug my baby a little closer.

(ps, i’m probably about 80-ish% better than i was yesterday…..since i’m not like, curled in the fetal position rocking back and forth hoping the nausea will pass. i can keep food down. but i’m very weak and tired, and even holding luke while sitting down makes me feel a little sick. so this was even less pleasant than you might imagine)

it felt like we were called to certain areas and then told to go back to sit down about 4 or 5 times. in the course of this happening, luke had an explosion in his diaper, and his diaper rash is SO BAD (like, blistering, cracking, almost bleeding) that you can’t let that shit (literally) sit in his diaper for even a minute before he starts crying in pain. so i rushed him off to the bathroom to change him, and he peed everywhere while i was doing this. as gross and terrible as that sounds, i was actually HAPPY that he peed because it meant SOME form of liquid had actually gotten in his system after all this time. it was an ordeal getting him put back together (because of the screaming during diaper changes i mentioned previously), and we were called back shortly after. 

this should have been a relief, but instead we sat in the room for AN HOUR before being seen. we kept passing luke back and forth while he cried and moaned, and had another diaper explosion. the doctor was fantastic (once she finally showed!), and he behaved pretty well for her. she decided that he needed to get some IV fluids because of his age, and she wanted to test his blood to see how dehydrated he really was. this is when it got bad, at least temporarily. a nurse came and led me and luke out to another room. one nurse worked on him while another literally pinned him down, and i could barely hold his hand and tell him it was okay. they stuck him in his right arm and blew his vein. i was sooo close to both crying and screaming at them. they flipped him around and started the process all over again in his left arm. they drew blood (and i remember thinking it was sooo dark), and then left in the tubes for his fluids. they taped his arm to a board so he wouldn’t be able to bend his elbow, and then let me carry him back to our room. i walked in with a huge bandage on his right arm, and his left arm on a board all taped up with a tube sticking out of it….you should have seen the look on matt’s face like, what did they do to him?! i very nearly broke down at that moment, but i was also sick to my stomach and just needed to sit and calm down before i made myself sick again which would have just made everything worse.

the nurse came in only a few minutes later and plugged his fluids in. she turned down the lights and put on some cartoons, and matt held luke so i could settle my stomach. within a few minutes, luke slumped over and fell asleep on matt. i took pictures on my phone and sent them to my email to share, but for some reason it only sent thumb nail size pictures?? so it’s hard to see. he slept all through his first round of fluids, and the nurse came in to lower his dosage until the blood work came back and they knew how much more he needed. that didn’t last very long…the doctor came in soon after and said he was pretty dehydrated so she wanted him to sit through another round. she set that up, and then came back with some plain pedialyte and told us if he could drink a decent a mount of a pedialyte-juice mixture that she would feel confident enough to discharge him. he was still asleep, so we had to wait a while to test that out. matt sent me off in search of the cafeteria to get us lunch (we didn’t realize we’d be spending all morning there), and when i came back luke was awake. even more than that – he was smiling and "talking" and reaching for the drink i’d just bought. he came to life so much – that he started to notice the IV and was trying to grab it and pull it off his arm. that made things interesting as you might imagine. he drank 8oz of a pedialyte-juice mixture, and as of right now he’s still kept it down. so, she let us go. 

i hate that he had to go through this. i don’t know why this lasted so long for him? a few people suggested that his immune system might have not recovered from his recent sickness & antibiotics enough to get rid of it as quickly as i seemed to have? while i’m not 100% i don’t fear puking or pooping anymore….poor luke has been dealing with this for almost 4 days now. his poor little body. 🙁

what a freakin’ weekend.