Monday, October 10, 2011

My Sickie

I always had a hunch that my adventurous children would wind up in the emergency room sooner rather than later but when it happened, and not due to any daring behavior I still found it caught me off guard.

It happened just over a week ago now but each day that passes I'm thankful that I don't have to spend 5 1/2 hours in the ER. It's not a very exciting story. Basically Miss A woke me up to tell me she'd thrown up in her bed. Not the nicest way for either of us to wake up but, it happens. Peter called in to take the day off work and I planned to take Miss B to her sitter and go to work leaving Peter and Miss A to have a lounge on the couch watching movies day. That is not how things went down.

Miss A just kept getting sick, it wasn't long before her stomach was completely empty and yet, she still continued to vomit. I tried to get her to sip water but she barely took any. What happened next seemed to happen quickly. She seemed to suddenly become really lethargic and her vomit began to look bloody and was looking more so each time she was sick.

I was on the phone with Health Links by this time. They told me we should go to the ER so that is where we headed.

Peter held her in his arms in the back seat as we drove and Bella chirped at them about how they didn't have their seat belts on. When we arrived at the ER they weighed Miss A on the baby scale because she couldn't stand. Thinking it would be a while, I zipped Miss B over to her babysitters. When I got back to the hospital Miss A was in a bed, had her blood taken and they'd put in an IV. This was the part where I started to cry, I didn't want to upset her so I got myself under control pretty quickly.

Within 20 minutes she seemed completely better. They'd given her both an anti-nauseate and medication to reduce the acid in her stomach through IV. Then we waited. And waited. And waited some more. The pediatrician came to see her. He told us he suspected it was simply a virus that hit her very hard for some reason.

We waited for the test results to come back. They didn't show anything unusual and she kept some liquid down so we were cleared to go. They wanted to leave the IV attachment in overnight in case it started up again. This was a drag. They were confident that I could take it out the next day but instead I took her to a walk in doctor to have it removed. She would never have let me do it.

It took her a while to start eating more normally again. But she seems better now. I'm not convinced that it was a virus. I suspect her chronic constipation, actually but when I suggested it to our regular physician he seemed skeptical. So now we wait and see what happens. Hopefully no more ER trips in the near future.

Here she is with her IV under a bandage.