Aug. 10, 2015, 8:04 a.m.
“I hot,” she said sometime around 2am on Monday, August 3rd, 2015. To the touch, she was indeed hot. It made sense, as her two brothers were beginning to have diarrhea, and the past week Brian had felt really poorly the day after he thoroughly cleaned our front-loading washing machine, which has an ongoing hankering for collecting mold in its crevices. The day after the cleaning, even I had felt headachey, blaming myself for staying up too late and not drinking enough water.
I went in that night and lay next to her, which has always calmed her since she was born, and we slept without incident through the night. The next day, I went to work and she to the park with her brother and nanny, and I didn’t think much more of it. Until Tuesday, around 2am, when she again awoke and was again hot to the touch. I slept next to her in her bed that night, too, until we parted ways for work and play the next morning. By Wednesday, when her brothers had recovered more or less from their terrible diarrhea, her fevers were still climbing. On Thursday night, she reached 104, and I decided to take the day off from work on Friday and take her to the pediatrician. On Friday morning, she wouldn’t get out of bed for the first time ever in her brief 2.5 years. I worked at the computer next to the bed where she slept until we left for our 2:30pm appointment.
We spent close to 5 hours at the pediatrician’s office, and they were quite fixated on the idea of her having a UTI. I knew she didn’t, and told them as much. I told them that this lethargic, exhausted, feverish girl was not the daugher I knew and cherished. That there was something very wrong. But nonetheless we sat with a bag taped over her vagina for close to 2.5 hours, waiting for her to pee (“Mama, I pee!” she said with a smile after so long, since the fevers had taken so much of her water), before they concluded that she did not have a UTI and sent us home without a plan and with her fever rising once again.
That night, when we took her temperature, as she curled up next to me in our bed, I shut my eyes when it crested 105. And the next day, we packed a bag with snacks, diapers, and plenty of distractions before we headed to the Stanford ER.
They kind of dismissed us as overprotective mother and minimally ill child for the first few hours at Stanford, too, to be honest. But then they drew her blood after we had been there for several hours, something in hindsight I should have argued for at the pediatrican’s office the previous day. It was only when those results came back that suddenly four doctors with serious eyes were at once in our room, giving us a hint of how life as we had known it had changed in an instant, with the blink of an eye, and forever. Before. After. This blog is about Aila’s story after.
Comments
vk 9 years, 2 months ago
Am familiar with the unconcealable look the docs had in their eyes. I can only imagine it being in relation to news about my child.
Link | ReplyNew Comment