What a Life!

I’ve been a SAHM since Ben was born. And as a SAHM, I’ve always felt bad for the plight of working parents when their children get sick and they can’t send them to daycare so they have to stay home. I can only imagine what chaos that would add to your life. Especially if there was something really important you needed to get done at work that day. But of course, this sympathy was only in my imagination – I had never been there myself.

Until this weekend.

I had been looking forward to our Knitting Guild meeting for weeks. We get together every two weeks, but two weeks ago I had company in town so I was unable to join everyone. I was really looking forward to getting out of the house and spending some time with other adults doing one of my favorite things…knitting.

But Friday afternoon, Joey had had a haphazard nap schedule and was rather grumpy (or so I thought). He woke up at 5:00 and I fed him. Then I set him down on the floor and started playing the piano. He was getting fussier and fussier…and I thought it was just our crazy day with going to town and everything. Around 5:40 I was playing Fur Elise (which I haven’t played in a while since I didn’t have a piano and there were a couple parts I was polishing up on) and I had to stop in the middle of the song because his fussing had just reached, you know, that point.

I picked him up and sat him in my lap. A few moments later, he threw up. As in a little fountain. His entire meal – cottage cheese at this point. All over him. All over me. Even some on the floor.

And being the mother of the same child who had pyloric stenosis when he was seven weeks old and he was throwing up and couldn’t keep anything down and I had to take him to the emergency room and they told us he had to have surgery or he would die so we spent four days in the hospital with the surgery and him getting better and everything…I. Flipped. Out.

Oh my goodness!

I cleaned him up, cleaned myself up, and tried to clean the vomit off the rug (we have wood floors upstairs and wouldn’t you know…he’d throw up on the rug). When Steve got home, I had everyone put back together – on the outside at least – and I was sitting on the couch freaking out.

Steve asked me how I was doing.

I told him Joey had just thrown up – not just spit-up, no, projectile throw-up.

Like when he had pyloric stenosis?

Yes. [The look on my face should have said it all.]

I decided to take his temperature. I must confess, I have never taken my child’s temperature before – my children have never needed such a procedure as a rectal temperature. But I thought he felt a bit hot so I decided to try and figure out how to do it. I did it like I remembered seeing the nurses do it at the hospital when Joey was born. The reading? 102.2

Good news and bad news. No mother wants her child to run a fever. But when had pyloric stenosis, there was no fever. And he’d pooped at least twice that day, something he didn’t do – couldn’t do – when he had pyloric stenosis (because nothing was able to get through thanks to that little overgrown muscle at the exit of the stomach that they had to cut up).

But still…

I called the doctor. I told him, “I know I’m completely overreacting…but my child (who is six months old and had pyloric stenosis when he was seven weeks old) just threw up and has a fever of 102.2.”

The doctor was very kind. [I think it was the same one who was on call when Joey had pyloric stenosis.] He told me to go ahead and put him to bed like normal. Then he thought Joey would wake up sometime between 8 and 9 and that I should take his temperature and go ahead and try to feed him if he wanted to eat. If he still wasn’t feeling well at that point, I could take him in if I wanted.

Joey wasn’t ready to go to bed at his normal time (6:30). I held him and rocked him and did everything I could to make him comfortable. At 7:00, I decided to give him Tylenol, after Steve helped me figure out how much to give him (my ability to think rationally was slightly compromised…). Once he was asleep, I called the local after-hours clinic to see how late they were open – if I took him there, it would cost me a simple office visit co-pay; taking him to the emergency room, after our deductible was met and everything, would cost us about $1000 (I may not have been 100% rational, but I could still figure that out).

He woke up at 8:30 and his temp was still 101.5. I fed him, and he seemed to keep it down okay. But since his temperature was still high and I was overreacting, I decided to take him in to see the doctor. All the staff there thought he was so cute. The doctor checked him and his ears were fine, his throat was fine, and his abdomen felt fine too. The doctor told me there was a bug going around and his kids had had it – it started with vomiting and then morphed into diarhea; one of his kids was over it in four days, the other was sick for a week.

Joey never threw up again. But I did take his temperature and gave him Tylenol three times on Saturday in order to help keep him comfortable. And I stayed home and cancelled all my fun plans for the day (more than just the knitting guild meeting). I was so sad and disappointed. But in almost four years of being a mother (Ben will be four in July), I should count myself lucky that this is the first time this has happened to me…where I had to cancel all my plans and stay home because I had a child who was sick. For everything, there has to be a first time, and I guess for me, this was it.

Today, Joey still has diarhea. He must have woken up with it this morning – he was fussing and Ben was still asleep so I went in there and tried to change his diaper in the dark as I usually do in the middle of the night and all of a sudden I felt this slimy stuff all over my hands that kind of burned. I turned on the light – which woke Ben up – and sure enough, there was poop everywhere. Joey sure was happy when I got it all cleaned up. Now I know why we’ve been battling diaper rash over the past few days as well.

Last week I had scheduled Joey’s six-month well-baby doctor visit for yesterday, and I took him in as planned. I mentioned to our doctor that he had been six over the weekend, and that, of course, after his having pyloric stenosis, I had totally overreacted. [This is why I love our family doctor… He has thirteen children of his own, and one of them, he told us when Joey was in the hospital, also had pyloric stenosis; in his case, even though his daddy was a doctor, he went down hill very fast and it was quite the experience.]

So when I told him that Joey had been sick and that I totally overreacted, he laughed and told me that his wife gets that way too when their son who had pyloric stenosis gets sick. When any of their other children get sick, they have to be strong and tough it out. But when that boy gets sick, he has to sit on the couch and isn’t allowed to do anything and she gets all in a tizzy over it. It doesn’t matter how old he is – she still gets that way whenever he gets sick and throws up. He said, Once you have that experience, it’s really hard to forget. I must say, I feel her pain.

Joey is sleeping now. Hopefully the diarhea part will end soon. He’s been a bit fussier – a lot fussier when he had a fever – but overall he’s done quite well. None of the rest of us have seemed to come down with it…yet. I think he got it from being held by someone else while they treat me at the chiropractor’s office – that is the only opportunity I can think of where he would be exposed to something the rest of us weren’t exposed to. The clinic doctor told us it’s quite contagious, though, so we have yet to see if any of the rest of us will get sick (I don’t know what the incubation time is – we’d been at the chiropractor’s office on Monday afternoon and Friday morning, and he got sick late Friday afternoon).

Here’s to hoping for the best!