Sick babies...

If you ask me, there is nothing more sad than a sick baby. 

Except, maybe, a sick baby in a hospital gown.

This picture is from our trip to the ER back in February when Oliver had RSV, Croup and an Ear Infection.

Unfortunately, we made another trip to the ER recently.  Oliver had been sick with a cold, it got worse and after a couple of days of fever we took him to the doctor, and he was diagnosed with a double ear-infection.  He was prescribed some anti-biotics and after a few days seemed to be doing better.  We finished the anti-biotics. Then he took a turn for the worse.  He had several days of fever around 102-103.  Thursday evening, my baby was not looking so good.  We kept him on tylenol but his fever went up, and up, and up.  When he woke at 5:00 am Friday morning he was on fire and his temp was 105.4--GULP! 

That is S-C-A-R-Y range.

So we dressed quickly and headed to Children's of Minneapolis.  Oliver was an extremly sleepy baby, and while we didn't get much rest, Oliver made himself comfortable.

 

Sleeping peacefully.  Too bad it didn't last.

The doctor came in and took a look, his ears were still infected, but not bad enough to explain the super high fever.  She explained that she wanted to do a blood culture, and urine culture and maybe a chest X-ray.  The nurse would be in shortly to get a urine sample and a blood sample.

Oh.

Ok.

Wait...

How do you get a urine sample from an infant?

With a catheder!?!

Oh my poor baby!  My poor, sweet, sick, uncomfortable-enough-without-anyone-sticking-a-tube-up-his-yoohoo-thank-you-very-much, baby!

Now, I have a lot of respect for nurses, they do very noble work.  But I wanted to throttle those nurses.  THEY WERE HURTING MY BABY!

 I just about died as I watched them pin my baby down and do their business to his business.  And the screaming.  The red-faced, body-shaking, voice-quivering screaming.  We were both seriously traumatized by it, so much so that it took me almost a week to get my wits about me enough to write this post. After all the torture, I nursed him, and he cuddled with Papa until he fell back asleep like this:

The good news is, nothing was seriously wrong. Diagnosis is probable virus that slowed the ability of the anti-biotics to do their thing.  More anti-biotics and time should do the trick.

I am so sad for my baby that he has been in the hospital three times now (when he was 4 months old he had two inguinal hernias repaired, and the RSV incident discussed above), but I am SO grateful that each time it was for relatively minor things.  Overall I have a healthy, happy baby and a Mama couldn't ask for anything more.