So, I got a little freaked out last night. Those of you who know me are probably thinking to yourselves, Ditzy? Freak out? Surely you are overstating!, but NO, Last night I FREAKED OUT. As we should all know from so eagerly reading every single one of my oh so interesting blog entries that I am the mother of two beautiful boys and have another added into the mix thanks to my wonderful boyfriend's addition of a son. My oldest has made it to 11 years old by only 
having made it to the ER on one single occasion. That occasion being a lazy Sunday afternoon during which there was no emergent care facility other than the Emergency Room option. He had a cough for oh weeks, that seemed just that, a cough then when I picked him up from a friends house who had watched him overnight while I worked they said, hmmm, maybe you should take him in this cough is NASTY. So, off to the ER we went. X-rays and a stern lecture on cough medicine from the ER doc later my little 5 year old had bi-lateral pneumonia, and yet I walked away not FREAKED because it was really not that freaky of a situation. Xander was just an easy, not sick ever kind of kid. Barrett is proving to be a totally different kind of child. Yesterday afternoon he felt a little warm. I gave him Motrin, a half hour later he felt not so warm. Eh, just teething. (Friday we went in for a follow up with the Dr as at his 1 yr appointment he had fluid in his ear but no ear infection, we got the all clear...yay!!) Saturday night, as we are getting ready for bed, Kev notices Bear is again warm, he says REALLY warm. I point out that is the SAME thing I had noticed EARLIER in the day and no one seemed to heed me, but I got the thermometer and he took his arm pit temp...102.4 unadjusted. So pull out the trusty Motrin again and dose him up and get him to sleep. He doesn't rest well, and at some point early on in the night I end up pulling him into bed with me. This is done with much trepidation as I was very determined to keep him in his own space since moving him there little over a week before when we weaned and moved him from the family bed. I wasn't sleeping long when my baby was really not making his normal happy sleepy sounds, started murmuring in his sleep and I touched his head. He was BURNING up. I unzipped his sleeper and his body was BURNING UP! I woke Kevin to check to see if maybe I was not correct in my assessment of this temperature change. I was not wrong. Due to bad lighting and panic induced, well panic, I couldn't read the temperature reading on the thermometer and the command decision was made that this was just TOO HOT and Barrett needed to go to the ER as soon as possible. Trying to keep it together and not freak out I threw a pair of pants and t-shirt on my baby who I had in the process of assessing his temperature had stripped down to his diaper (as I am sure any mother would have done) thanked God in a silent prayer that I wore my most publicly acceptable pajamas to bed that night WITH appropriately colored underwear (white if you must know) so they were not fully visible. So, sock less throwing a blanket around my baby, slipping on my croc like walmart special shoes checking to find at least two diapers in the diaper bag and grabbing my purse and a coat for the baby I head out the door with the keys to the car. I travel somewhat over the speed limit but come on 35 mph when there is NO ONE around...REALLY??? BUT I DO stop for all 
stop signs and lights a long the way to the hospital. All the while glancing back at my listless looking baby who's red little cheeks speak more to sickness than rosy glad hearted holiday glee. Looking back at this point I am very proud I did not become one of those people who suddenly panics, turn s on my flashers and runs 70 or nothing to the hospital with no regard to traffic signs or signals. Really you should be proud of me too. Read on there is plenty I hang my head in shame for, really! So we arrive, walk in, check in, sit down and wait. The triage nurse calls us into the first little room. Barrett has to sit on a scale, for which he screams a scream I find he can only make when he has a fever. She then runs the thermometer that scans their forehead across his well forehead, and it read 102.4 and she gives me the unmistakable "well hello first time mommy who panics when baby gets a little warm, glad we have a taker for the non emergency, emergency room visit, hope you have the $400 we are going to charge you at the door when you leave" look. OK maybe you have never seen this look but I have a sense for these things. So she does her assessment and then we move on to the "paperwork" phase of things, which is where I have to confess I have not located my insurance card, yes we are on the record with the ER and this hospital, they SHOULD have copies of the cards and I will contact my employer and get cards sometimes this millennium, I swear! Then a male nurse (I won't say blanket statement he was gay but my gay-dar was going OFF) who was very nice helped carry my bags back to a room while informing me that not only will everything be ok but being that Barrett is a boy "I should get used to this, boys see LOTS of Emergency Rooms" to which I responded, um not my 11 yo!! I am not sure why I felt the need to argue with possibly not gay male nurse but my gosh I should get used to this??? Then in the most SHOCKING turn of events I have to say in almost my entire 34 years of life they tell me the doctor will be in in a minute and she literally walks RIGHT IN! IN THE ER! She checks my son and informs me that he has an ear infection. I argue that no, he was just checked Friday AM for an ear infection, and she responds with, NO, he does and these things happen and often times spike with a fever like that. THEN she says By The WAY You are SEVERELY under dosing your child with Tylenol and Motrin according to his weight! (Hand me the Worst Mother of the Year Award, Thank You Let me get my acceptance speech out) I have been using Infants Tylenol and Motrin for my child, I guess, Unbeknownst to me I was supposed to have transitioned to Children's Tylenol and Motrin. Now, I have researched this since she drove the spike of a worst mother ever trophy through my heart and found that it NOT ONLY states 2 years and older on the Children's products but also says under 24 lbs at Dr's recommendations only. Now, my Pediatrician was the one at fault, not me. So at my next appointment with him I will pass this wonderful trophy on to him. Ahhhh I feel better now. Oh yes back to my story. So they give my son the "appropriate" dose of Tylenol and leave us. I assume for some medical reason only doctors and nurses will ever understand and I spend all that time noticing that my baby feels much warmer than 102.5 degrees and I am sure that he is getting warmer and I am just not believing he is getting better and the noises he is making are not good. I can't sit down cause my back hurts and I can't stay standing cause my back hurts and just as I make my 3000th pass by the door to the room looking at my baby's reflection in the window of the door he begins to vomit. All over me. Not over my shoulder. Between us. All over BOTH of us. Being the calm and together mother I am I start yelling "Help, someone Help me! My baby is puking all over me!!" I will stop describing this event here. Leaving it at
having made it to the ER on one single occasion. That occasion being a lazy Sunday afternoon during which there was no emergent care facility other than the Emergency Room option. He had a cough for oh weeks, that seemed just that, a cough then when I picked him up from a friends house who had watched him overnight while I worked they said, hmmm, maybe you should take him in this cough is NASTY. So, off to the ER we went. X-rays and a stern lecture on cough medicine from the ER doc later my little 5 year old had bi-lateral pneumonia, and yet I walked away not FREAKED because it was really not that freaky of a situation. Xander was just an easy, not sick ever kind of kid. Barrett is proving to be a totally different kind of child. Yesterday afternoon he felt a little warm. I gave him Motrin, a half hour later he felt not so warm. Eh, just teething. (Friday we went in for a follow up with the Dr as at his 1 yr appointment he had fluid in his ear but no ear infection, we got the all clear...yay!!) Saturday night, as we are getting ready for bed, Kev notices Bear is again warm, he says REALLY warm. I point out that is the SAME thing I had noticed EARLIER in the day and no one seemed to heed me, but I got the thermometer and he took his arm pit temp...102.4 unadjusted. So pull out the trusty Motrin again and dose him up and get him to sleep. He doesn't rest well, and at some point early on in the night I end up pulling him into bed with me. This is done with much trepidation as I was very determined to keep him in his own space since moving him there little over a week before when we weaned and moved him from the family bed. I wasn't sleeping long when my baby was really not making his normal happy sleepy sounds, started murmuring in his sleep and I touched his head. He was BURNING up. I unzipped his sleeper and his body was BURNING UP! I woke Kevin to check to see if maybe I was not correct in my assessment of this temperature change. I was not wrong. Due to bad lighting and panic induced, well panic, I couldn't read the temperature reading on the thermometer and the command decision was made that this was just TOO HOT and Barrett needed to go to the ER as soon as possible. Trying to keep it together and not freak out I threw a pair of pants and t-shirt on my baby who I had in the process of assessing his temperature had stripped down to his diaper (as I am sure any mother would have done) thanked God in a silent prayer that I wore my most publicly acceptable pajamas to bed that night WITH appropriately colored underwear (white if you must know) so they were not fully visible. So, sock less throwing a blanket around my baby, slipping on my croc like walmart special shoes checking to find at least two diapers in the diaper bag and grabbing my purse and a coat for the baby I head out the door with the keys to the car. I travel somewhat over the speed limit but come on 35 mph when there is NO ONE around...REALLY??? BUT I DO stop for all 
stop signs and lights a long the way to the hospital. All the while glancing back at my listless looking baby who's red little cheeks speak more to sickness than rosy glad hearted holiday glee. Looking back at this point I am very proud I did not become one of those people who suddenly panics, turn s on my flashers and runs 70 or nothing to the hospital with no regard to traffic signs or signals. Really you should be proud of me too. Read on there is plenty I hang my head in shame for, really! So we arrive, walk in, check in, sit down and wait. The triage nurse calls us into the first little room. Barrett has to sit on a scale, for which he screams a scream I find he can only make when he has a fever. She then runs the thermometer that scans their forehead across his well forehead, and it read 102.4 and she gives me the unmistakable "well hello first time mommy who panics when baby gets a little warm, glad we have a taker for the non emergency, emergency room visit, hope you have the $400 we are going to charge you at the door when you leave" look. OK maybe you have never seen this look but I have a sense for these things. So she does her assessment and then we move on to the "paperwork" phase of things, which is where I have to confess I have not located my insurance card, yes we are on the record with the ER and this hospital, they SHOULD have copies of the cards and I will contact my employer and get cards sometimes this millennium, I swear! Then a male nurse (I won't say blanket statement he was gay but my gay-dar was going OFF) who was very nice helped carry my bags back to a room while informing me that not only will everything be ok but being that Barrett is a boy "I should get used to this, boys see LOTS of Emergency Rooms" to which I responded, um not my 11 yo!! I am not sure why I felt the need to argue with possibly not gay male nurse but my gosh I should get used to this??? Then in the most SHOCKING turn of events I have to say in almost my entire 34 years of life they tell me the doctor will be in in a minute and she literally walks RIGHT IN! IN THE ER! She checks my son and informs me that he has an ear infection. I argue that no, he was just checked Friday AM for an ear infection, and she responds with, NO, he does and these things happen and often times spike with a fever like that. THEN she says By The WAY You are SEVERELY under dosing your child with Tylenol and Motrin according to his weight! (Hand me the Worst Mother of the Year Award, Thank You Let me get my acceptance speech out) I have been using Infants Tylenol and Motrin for my child, I guess, Unbeknownst to me I was supposed to have transitioned to Children's Tylenol and Motrin. Now, I have researched this since she drove the spike of a worst mother ever trophy through my heart and found that it NOT ONLY states 2 years and older on the Children's products but also says under 24 lbs at Dr's recommendations only. Now, my Pediatrician was the one at fault, not me. So at my next appointment with him I will pass this wonderful trophy on to him. Ahhhh I feel better now. Oh yes back to my story. So they give my son the "appropriate" dose of Tylenol and leave us. I assume for some medical reason only doctors and nurses will ever understand and I spend all that time noticing that my baby feels much warmer than 102.5 degrees and I am sure that he is getting warmer and I am just not believing he is getting better and the noises he is making are not good. I can't sit down cause my back hurts and I can't stay standing cause my back hurts and just as I make my 3000th pass by the door to the room looking at my baby's reflection in the window of the door he begins to vomit. All over me. Not over my shoulder. Between us. All over BOTH of us. Being the calm and together mother I am I start yelling "Help, someone Help me! My baby is puking all over me!!" I will stop describing this event here. Leaving it at 
1. the smell is horrible, table food fed babies should not be allowed to regurgitate their food onto their mothers it should be illegal and I will not stand for it. I would like the chance to prosecute in the future if the opportunity should present itself! 2. My sweet baby will never be allowed to consume Mandarin oranges again, as I am sure that mommy will never consume them in this lifetime either.
So one sweet caring nurse came in and helped me strip my sick little boy down to his diaper and provided me with an awful yet puke free hospital gown to wear. Environmental services showed up very quickly to clean up our "chemical spill" and all was quickly righted as well as it could be. Then the nurses finally decided to take a rectal temperature. I have no idea what the exact temp was but I know it was over 104. The nurse started to wet down wash cloths and put them on my poor little boogs head and told me to swap them out as they got warm, which was very quickly. While doing this, I called my mommy and asked her to come help me with boog so I could go to my apartment and get me and Bear some clothes so that we had something to wear when we were released to go home. Grandma arrived to a very sad and solemn Bear wearing a washcloth on his head and prepared for his first temperature check since the initial finding of such a high temp (somewhere in the mix he was given Motrin but I couldn't tell you for sure when in the mix that was) and the reading was 103. At this point he was more than happy to lay 
on Gram ma's shoulder and momma ran home and put on clothes and grabbed garb for the Bear and some extra diapers and headed back to the Hospital. We were informed that 101 was the magic number that would get us released, but he had magic Gram ma Love working on him and the next temperature reading after she was there had his temp down to 100.4 degrees and we were cleared to go home. With a stop over at Walgreen's (props to Grandma for paying for the Prescription and Children's Tylenol and Motrin that we needed to stock at the house) then home we went. It was a very long night. It was 4am. I would like to say this is where this adventure ended but we fought the fever all night Sunday, with it breaking early AM Monday, then again having his temp jump back up on Monday night. But we are sure that the antibiotics are doing their work and given the 10 days to work on it, it will hopefully kick this infections butt!
on Gram ma's shoulder and momma ran home and put on clothes and grabbed garb for the Bear and some extra diapers and headed back to the Hospital. We were informed that 101 was the magic number that would get us released, but he had magic Gram ma Love working on him and the next temperature reading after she was there had his temp down to 100.4 degrees and we were cleared to go home. With a stop over at Walgreen's (props to Grandma for paying for the Prescription and Children's Tylenol and Motrin that we needed to stock at the house) then home we went. It was a very long night. It was 4am. I would like to say this is where this adventure ended but we fought the fever all night Sunday, with it breaking early AM Monday, then again having his temp jump back up on Monday night. But we are sure that the antibiotics are doing their work and given the 10 days to work on it, it will hopefully kick this infections butt! 
