fourth trip to the doctor in four weeks

Two month well check, pink eye visit, sick visit for congestion and fever, then this.

Tuesday night Josh was awake pretty much all night crying.  He just couldn't sleep.  We stayed downstairs so as not to keep everyone else up.  Jonathan stayed with him until midnight or so and then I took over.  He started running a low temperature and I could only get him to sleep upright on me.  He was very congested and not just fussy but downright mad.  I gave him tylenol and let him sleep on me in the glider and it was pitiful.  I knew something was wrong and took him in to the doctor's office first thing in the morning. 

Well, I was there from 7:45am until about 9:30am with the doctor testing him for EVERYTHING.  She just couldn't figure out what was causing the fever, after all we had just been there ten days before with similar symptoms and they had taken a blood sample, seen thast his white blood cell count was elevated, and written it off as just a virus.

So on Tuesday they took his blood again and the counts this time were way too high (19,000 wbc).  They cleared his nose, catheterized him to test for UTI, looked in his ears (which were clogged with wax so they had to clean them four times), etc.  Everything came back negative so she sent me to another office to do a chest x-ray to check for pneumonia. She told me to expect a two to three hour wait.

The whole morning was torture.  He was screaming the whole time and he couldn't nurse because he couldn't breathe.

We drove over to the other office. Fortunately, they got us in right away. They did the two chest x-rays and sent them back to the peds office.  By the time I made it home the ped has called me back saying that she had the results and everything looked clear.  She wanted me to come back in to do some more tests because a three month old baby shouldn't be running a 100 degree temperature unless there was some type of infection.

I finally got him to nurse and he had his first wet diaper in HOURS.  We went back over to the peds office and then they tested him for flu, RSV, and checked his ears again.  Still couldn't find anything.  Then she decided to take a larger blood culture to test for some type of bacterial infection of the blood.  Finally, she decided to give him a shot of rocephin (antibiotics) to start fighting whatever infection it was and she asked me to come back in the next day to make sure the wbc count was going down.

I remember when Julianna had to be catheterized and it was absolutely awful.  This experience was similar except that it lasted about five hours. 

Sure enough his fever peaked at about 4pm at 100.1 and then it started going back down and he was clearly starting to feel better.  He got several good long naps upright in his car seat and then by the evening he was eating normally again and went down for the night at about normal time.

We went back in to the office on Wednesday morning and the doctor that we saw then was able to see inside his ears better since they weren't so swollen and waxy.  She saw both ears were infected and told me to start him on amoxicillan.  He had gained 4 ounces in less than 24 hours (from 15 lbs 15 oz to 16 lbs 3 oz) and he had no fever.  The rocephin shot had helped just enough for her to diagnose a double ear infection and his wbc count was back down to 13,000.

He's still congested but obviously doing much, much better.  We are all trying to catch up on sleep and we are hoping to get snowed in this weekend so we can have some family "time-off" together.

Hope you all have a nice weekend!