This has been quite the week for our family. Monday morning I had my OB apt. I had felt like baby brother had not been moving as much as he used to, but I had been sick (I swear we have been sick since the second day of school), and I also knew that as he grew there was less room for him to wiggle, so I didn't know how much to worry about it.
Dr. Kuykendall (I didn't mention, but she's the mother of one of the girls' preschool friends), checked his heart rate and it was a bit lower, so they hooked me up to a monitor. His heart rate baseline was in the 90s, then would have consistent variability up to the 150s. They weren't sure to worry or not, so I was scheduled to come back Tuesday morning to make sure we're OK.
Well, Katie had been complaining of neck pain on Monday, and we just assumed she had slept wrong or pulled something. That night she woke up screaming in pain at 11:30. We gave her motrin and sent her back to bed. She woke up screaming inconsolably at 1 and would not let Jeremy touch her neck. I packed the bag I'd started that night in case I needed to stay in the hospital for baby monitoring and she and I went to the ED. There they put in an IV (which was a bit of a fight), and decided to do a CT scan because we were watching a small lump grow just below her left ear. She threw up once there, and kept complaining of wanting to throw up again. They decided to start IV antibiotics and admit us to the peds floor. Unfortunately, there is no in house pediatrician, so it took a while to get a good diagnosis and plan. After getting her settled on the peds floor, Lindsay came and sat with her after dropping the twins off at school and I went to my follow-up monitoring apt. His heart rate was still sitting pretty low, so they sent me to Labor and Delivery to get a more thorough monitoring. I went wondering if he had the cord wrapped around him and I would be having a C-section one floor above where Katie was. I was mentally saying, OK, this is what we need to do, and we just want him to come safely. Well, his baseline was in the 120s with beautiful variability, so they sent me out. Downstairs I went to sit with Kate.
Basically, she had an infected lymph node, but the antibiotic we were using wasn't touching it. She was maintaining a low grade fever and was more or less delirious for several hours. The pediatrician who came on called Seattle Children's Hospital and they recommended Vancomycin. So we pulled out the big guns. It got the fever to go down, then she broke out into redman syndrome while the ENT consulting doc was there trying to talk through what to do. We stopped the infusion and started benadryl, which brought down her itching and redness. They still wanted to give it at a slower pace in the middle of the night, which brought the redman syndrome back, though much less severe, and we were able to treat it with benadryl. She had no appetite all day Tuesday, but by Wednesday morning she was ready to start eating again. We kept her on the antibiotics, but fortunately we made the switch to PO bactrim after she pulled out her IV from tripping and we were able to go home Thursday. She was still breaking out in a rash from the bactrim, so after meeting with her pediatrician for a follow-up, we were able to switch to PO clyndamycin, that treated the infection with no further side effects.
It was amazing to me how crazy things seemed, but how well I was able to handle it. Sleeping at the hospital was a little tiring, but I function really well in crisis mode. It's much easier to assess and deal with life and death issues for me than it is to get the girls out the door without yelling at them.
It was good to see the hospital Jeremy works in and to be impressed with the nursing care, yet appalled at the lack of support the staff have from the administration. Either way, we are grateful there was nothing more serious going on and we were able to treat her as quickly as we did. And also grateful that we didn't need to surgically have a baby at the same time.
