The Week From Hell

And that is not an exaggeration....















SUNDAY

It all started Sunday afternoon when a house started to burn. The call went out and Brian left to help. I was at home with Owen listening to the scanner. It sounded like things were pretty bad, so I thought they could use all the hands they could get. I called my lovely neighbour Becky and asked if things got any worse whether she might be able to watch Owen for a few hours. She said fine, so I took him over there and headed to the fire. It had been a while since I'd been on a fire and once I got there I realized that this was not going to be a "couple hour" deal. After about an hour of helping fight the fire, I called Becky to tell her I was likely going to be quite late (it was 6 pm by now) and would that be OK? She then said she'd been about to call because her little one Holden (who is 6 months old) was having a really tough time breathing. I told her to call the ambulance or take him to the hospital and that I would come and get Owen.

Getting off a fire isn't an easy thing to do though, but I managed it (with a few disapproving glares) and headed home to get Owen. Brian stayed on the fire. It turned out to be a good thing Becky went to the hospital as Holden had pneumonia. But he was stable and getting the right treatment.

The fire went on all night (read about it here) and Brian didn't get home until 10 am the next morning...

MONDAY
With Brian home and able to watch Owen, I had a magazine to get to bed. I headed to work, as I was coming up one two of the busiest weeks of my job. By about 7:30pm, I was still at the office and the snow was coming down fast and thick. Then the pager went off for a report of a snow plow versus car accident (read about it here), one dead one seriously injured, and the accident was way the way out there.

Instead of heading home I headed to the Fire Station to provide stand-by coverage (in case there was another call). The ambulance crew got back a couple hours later having taken the patient to the hospital. The hospital then called asking for an ambulance to drive this patient to Twin Falls airport, so that a medical helicopter could take him to Boise where he could be better cared for (the extent of his injuries were too severe for our little local hospital to manage, and with a major snowstorm still going on no helicopter or plane could land in our valley). I was asked if I would be part of the medical crew that drove the patient to Twin Falls. So of I went. This was about 11:30pm. With the snowstorm the usual 2 and a half hour round trip to Twin, ended up taking us almost 6 hours, and I didn't get home and into bed until 8am, Tuesday morning...

TUESDAY
After catching a couple hours sleep I headed up to work to try and get a handle on things while Brian watched Owen.

WEDNESDAY
Brian and I both went to work after dropping Owen off at day care. At 3:30pm I got a call from Carey, the daycare nanny. Owen had a temperature of 103 and was lethargic and blurry eyed. I picked him up and took him straight to the doctor's office. Where he promptly perked up and had a temperature of 97.6. So obviously they thought there was nothing wrong with him and sent us home.

THURSDAY
After a night of temperatures over 101 we took him back to the doctors where they spotted a possible ear infection and gave us antibiotics. I was obviously concerned about pneumonia and also RSV (a nasty cold-like virus that can be very serious), but Dr. Morse assured us that RSV is not the big scare everyone thinks it is and that Owen seemed perfectly fine (his temperature again was down to 97 when we were at the doctor's office).

FRIDAY



















I was back at work and Brian was watching Owen, luckily he had the day off. At 5 pm I get a call from Brian saying "Don't panic, but I'm driving to the Emergency Room. Owen has a temp of 104 was shivering violently and threw up 6 times in a row."

I was already on my way home so I diverted to the hospital and waited anxiously for them. When they arrived it was obvious he was really sick, his skin was flushed and bone dry - you could feel the heat radiating off him - his eyes were glazed over and he was breathing heavily. The doctor checked him out, and his temp was still 103 (anything over 101 is considered severe in babies), so he decided to run some tests and give him some medication as well as IV fluids (he hadn't been eating or drinking much for the past two days).

Putting the IV into him was possibly the most horrible experience ever. We had to pin him down while the nurse and her assistant (who also happened to be the Mayor of Ketchum) tried to get a needle into his dehydrated little veins. He screamed non-stop the whole time, it was heartbreaking. But worth it.

After a couple hours of IV fluids and mediation he perked right up and his temperature went right down. They took him in for an x-ray to rule out pneumonia (another stressful experience as they had to strap him in a machine that kept his arms above his head, but thankfully I missed out on that one - the nurse said "Whose coming with us? Whoever is least likely to cry" so Brian went.) Thankfully there was no sign of pneumonia and all his other blood-work came back negative for any of the big nasties. However, they couldn't tell us why he was sick - he didn't have any cold-like symptoms, just a raging temperature.

After another couple hours they sent us home saying if his temp went above 104 and wasn't reduced with ibuprofen or Tylenol to come back in. So we headed home and a relieved Owen fell sound asleep in the car.

SATURDAY
4am: Having not slept much (I kept checking on Owen to make sure he was ok), Owen woke up at around 4am crying, I picked him up and he was so hot it almost hurt to touch him. His temp was over 104. I freaked out and was dressed in 2 seconds and out the door on my way to the hospital, but Brian calmed me down and made us give him some medicine and see if things went down. I think he was very conscious that another trip to the ER would mean another IV, which would have been so hard on the poor little guy. Thankfully within about 10 minutes the thermometer was ticking slowly downwards, stopping around 100.

As soon as they were open we headed back to the doctor's office, and saw a lady who was particularly useless, although she tried to be helpful. But again his temp was down and all other signs were good - but I was just very concerned that we were missing something. He was obviously sick but no one could tell us why.

SUNDAY
Finally by Sunday morning his temp had stabilized around 97 and he was eating and playing happily again. He seems to be a perfect, healthy little guy once again.

Seriously - a pretty rotten week.