Saturday+Sunday=Suck
Okay, that was the worst weekend ever.It wasn't because of the keelhauling that Oklahoma gave Texas Tech, although it did hurt a bit. That barely even made it to the radar screen.
What did fill up the radar screen unfortunately, was Eli 7.3 getting sick.
Eli stayed home from school last week on Monday and Tuesday because he had a cough and a runny nose, but it was borderline both days--he really didn't feel that badly. Plus, he'd had a rash for about a week (viral, his doctor thought, but self-resolving and not contagious). He went back to school on Wednesday, but he still wasn't quite 100%. Even on Friday, when he went to a birthday party, he still didn't quite seem back to normal.
Saturday morning, we went to Krispy Kreme and he seemed fine except that his nose was still running (and had been for about a week). In the afternoon, though, he said he didn't want to eat lunch, then he said he didn't feel good. Gloria took his temperature and it was 102. Suddenly, he had that sick kid look--he was suddenly a little paler and had dark circles under his eyes.
That's one of the things about being a parent. After a while, you can just look at your kid and know if he/she is sick.
After consulting with his doctor, we took him to an "urgent care" place that was open on the weekends. The doctor said that he thought it was a sinus infection, gave us a prescription for an antibiotic, and sent us home.
Eli was exhausted by this point (about 6:00 p.m.), still wasn't hungry, and fell asleep on the couch. Catch-22, because he needed rest, but he needed to eat and take his antibiotic worse, so we had to wake him up.
Good luck getting a sick kid to drink a dose of antibiotic when he's tired and confused.
Still, that's all survivable. He was asleep by 7:30, and we were hoping that he'd get a good night's sleep and feel much better (and hungry again) in the morning.
Then he woke up at 10:00. Threw up at midnight. Threw up a 1 a.m. Threw up at 2 a.m. Threw up at 3 a.m.
He wasn't really throwing anything up the last two times, because his stomach was empty, but he just couldn't stop the nausea.
At this point, we really had no freaking idea what's going on, but we were both really frightened by this point.
I remembered that we had some Zofran from last year when he went to the hospital because of something like this. So we gave him a dose, and that stopped the vomiting. Seriously, if you have a kid, have your pediatrician write a prescription so that you can have some in the house for emergencies, because it's like magic.
This morning, he started out drinking teaspoons of Gatorade every five minutes for an hour, then started drinking more, and no nausea (although his stomach still hurts). And he just ate three saltine crackers, 30 hours after the last time he ate, so that's a good sign. Three crackers in thirty hours--good grief!
Telling this story in the A-B-C-D format really omits the fear. When Eli gets sick to this degree, it's so frightening, because nothing you do seems to help. Plus, there's always the possibility that it's not some run-of-the mill illness. It's rare, but it could be something dangerous, and the more tired you get, the more you worry about the obscure. We both had about two hours of sleep Saturday night, and it was two really bad hours at that, so fatigue turned me into the parental equivalent of a Kennedy conspiracist, searching the Zapruder film frame-by-frame.
As I write this, it's 7:00 p.m. on Sunday, and I definitely think Eli is feeling better now, so maybe we turned the corner. What a scary weekend.
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