Oh...What a week!

For those of you unfamiliar with the above building, it is the College Station hospital. We are now quite familiar with its ER. Andrew has been having a reoccurring fever...in May, June, and now July. Fever and a bad throat (but not strep) seem to be his only symptoms. The latest bout started on Tuesday afternoon. Andrew laid down for a rest and woke up with a low 100's fever. Wednesday morning it was up to 104.4. I gave him a lukewarm bath...yeah that went over real well with the three year old...and proceeded with the medicine swap of Tylenol and Ibuprofen every 3 hours. His fever came down to the low 100's again and I called the doctor.

You mothers know how this goes...leave a message for the nurse and she will call you back. Well, I called at 10 am and by 2 pm I still had not heard back from her so I called and made an appointment. We got in at 3:00 and saw the doctor. We went through the whole story again and our doctor decided, after doing a bit of research, that we would run some labs. "Can Andrew pee in a cup?" the doctor asks. "Well, we have never tried, but we will see!" No problems there...the fun part came when the lab nurse went to draw his blood. I have to admit, he did not like it, but for a little guy he did a great job.

The first 2 tests came back very quickly and were fine. The third test, called a Sed rate, took an hour to get its results, so the doctor sent us home and said he would call. At 4:50 the nurse called and let us know that the doctor would like to see us...I informed her that he already had and that I thought she was calling to give us our lab results. How's that for office communication. She put us on hold and the doctor answered. According to him, the Sed rate was not high enough to convince him that it wasn't still an infection, but that it was high enough to make Him "squirm in his chair" and not rule out the bad stuff. I had no idea what Sed rate was or all that this bad stuff included, but a quick google and I knew that bad stuff were not things I wanted to be talking about in regards to my three year old. That was the last I spent on the Internet!!! Too much bad stuff to consider before it was warranted. The doctor said he would wait to see us again until Friday unless Andrew got worse. Well, not 20 minutes after hanging up with him...and time enough for the doctors office to close...his fever spiked to 105.8! Here we go again with the cool bath, more medicine (which had worn off since being at the doctors running tests), and some ice cream, we got it back down to 103.1.

In talking with a dear friend who called her doctor friend, we were back on the phone to the doctors office, waited for a after hours nurse to call us back, and then explained what had just happened. Praise God that our doctor was the one on call Wednesday evening. He sent us immediately to the ER and ordered a blood culture and antibiotics. So at 7:00ish on Wednesday evening Josh dropped Andrew and I off at the College Station ER. He ran Ainsley to our dear friends for them to watch so she would not have to endure the ER also. We are so blessed to have the Robertson's here to help. They are a huge blessing from God...since we were so used to having family around in times like these.

Things went very quickly and smoothly...as far as ER go...and we were in a room in less then half an hour of being there. We saw a million nurse, PA's, and 1 very nice pediatric ER doctor and explained our story a million times. We went through many pokes, prodes, and 1 strep test, which came back negative. Still no diagnosis, but through conversations between the ER doctors and our doctor, they opted not to do the blood cultures and just give him a daddy of all daddy antibiotics shot. He even got some numbing lotion on his leg to help with the pain. He survived the shot and got to pick out about 100 stickers with the nurse who felt awful about having to give it to him. At 11:00 we walked out, still not knowing what is causing the fevers, but medicated and tired.

We were told to continue the Tylenol/Ibuprofen swap every three hours around the clock and to call our doctor in the morning. The daddy shot worked and Andrew's fever broke in the night. His little jammies shirt was sopping wet with sweat. The doctor decided to try Thursday with 1 medicine every 6 hours, like it is supposed to be given, and see how his fever does. It stayed in the 99's and low 100's so we were good. Called back on Friday and the doctor told us to take him off of all meds and see what the fever does. We have been successfully off meds since Thursday morning and his fever has not broke 100!!! Yeah. Now that plan is to go in on Monday and run the labs again to see what his Sed rate is fever free and medicine free. If his Sed rate is back down, then this was just some bacterial infection that the medicine took care of and we will do further testing if and when a fever returns later down the road. If his Sed rate is still up, then it is one of the not good things and we will continue with further testing now.

All this to say, please keep us in you prayers. Ideal situation would be that his Sed rate is back down and if it does come back it is just chronic tonsillitis or something very manageable! We will keep you posted...