Sick Baby

So Emma started with a fever last Tuesday afternoon, just low grade at first & continued with a fever for the next few days but much higher at 103 - 103.5. So I called the dr to see if they wanted to see her & they said their rule is if they have run a fever for more than 3 days to bring her in & that is just what I did.

Now this was Friday & her fever had come down some to 101.9 but I wanted to take her to make sure it wasn't an ear infection or something. Dr. K checked her over & couldn't find anything right off but she wanted to run labs to see if she could find the cause of her continued fever. It is very rare for Emma to ran a continuous fever & one that is high. 

They stuck poor Emma twice to double check the results that showed her white blood cell & platelet counts were very lows. Dr. K was hoping this was just a bad virus but she said she couldn't send Emma home in good conscience without knowing for sure. We always have to be careful that her fevers are not related to an infection in her blood stream or her heart so Emma was admitted to the hospital. I felt so bad for her, she was so tired (little to no nap) & now we had to go to the hospital on a weekend of all times.

They started doing labs not long after we got there & I must admit, I had to leave the room to get backup. The backup wasn't for Emma but for myself. I do not handle medical things well at all & had already endured 2 sticks at the dr office, this one was more than I could handle. I didn't want them to have to deal with a fainting mother on the floor so I had to excuse myself. Thankfully my sister, Karen took over & stayed with Emma for the 30+ minutes it took them to get what they needed. 

The lab results came back & they were the same as Dr. K did, low white cells, red cells, & platelets. They also did a urine sample which never showed anything. Their first impression was that it was just a virus too, but they also wanted to rule out any blood/heart infections. 

The next day they ran labs again & it went very well, Chris went with Emma & it only took 5 minutes or less not 30 like the night before. When we got the lab results back Saturday afternoon, they were not what we had hoped for, her numbers had gone down a lot. They warned us this was possible since we didn't know if they were done declining or not. So they scheduled more labs for the next morning, Sunday.

They came to get Emma about 8:15am & these labs didn't go well either. They had to stick her several times & had to call in a PICU nurse to try. It took about 30 minutes for them to get it & Emma is so hard to get blood from, tiny veins. We got the labs back very soon & her white count had quadrupled & they decided it was safe to send us home.

Their diagnosis was still the same as when she was admitted, just a bad virus which they see a lot in little ones. They did give Emma some antibiotics while we were there but thankfully didn't need to take any home with us. Our only orders upon discharge was to follow-up with Dr. K in the next 24-48 hrs & we did so on Monday.

Little did we know Dr. K would have a little different plan. She called right before we left the house Monday morning for Emma's appointment to check on her & then found out once we arrived at the office she wanted us to wait until later in the week to run more labs to give her counts a little more time to come up. She went ahead & did labs anyway since we were there & her white count went back down again but at least her red count & platelets went back up. So she sent us on our way & asked me to bring her back next week. Emma will go back Wed. morning for more labs & we are all hoping her counts are back to normal. If they are not Dr. K plans to send Emma to a specialist to so a consult.