Today while I was at work wrapping up a meeting my wife calls me. Normally I would have called her back, but there were a couple of side conversations going so I quietly answered it. Turns out that little girl had a fever of 103.6. Now, I don’t know a whole lot about the ins and outs of baby health, but I know enough to know that anything approaching 104 is not cool at all (pun intended).
Since it was lunchtime, and Karen sounded pretty distressed, I drove home to see if I could help stand around and look concerned. Karen had arranged an appointment with the pediatrician at 1:45, so I was pretty much just going home to see if there was anything I could help with until then.
Courtney felt like a hot potato as I held her while Karen took a shower and got ready for the doctor visit. I headed back to work when they departed for the doctor appointment.
A while later I got a text message from Karen telling me to pack up and meet her at Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital. It’s not really the sort of message you want to get, ever. It turns out that her white blood cell count was over 20,000 and the pediatrician wanted to get some tests run over at the hospital. Apparently, this is a different illness than what she started with 10 days ago.
I have to say that it’s a really horrible experience watching your little girl get blood drawn. To make matters worse, the nurse had a difficult time finding a vein. The first needle had no luck finding blood even though she repositioned it several times after it had already pierced the skin (OUCH!). She looked for a vein in the other arm and couldn’t find any so went back to the first arm. Luckily, the second needle provided what they needed.
The vampire is evil
After the hospital, Karen took Courtney back over to the pediatrician’s for a shot of antibiotics. We won’t know what the tests yielded until tomorrow during our followup visit at the pediatrician. So we’ll keep our fingers crossed for good news.
Our little girl is such an incredible angel, that even while she’s sick she sat very quietly for several hours waiting for the tests to begin. She really is the cutest baby ever!