Nicholas Maravillas’ Blog

Our Nicholas can’t just get the sniffles and be done with it like other kids.  Oh no.  He has to take it a step further and out do himself each time.  He’s such an overachiever!

He did seem to just have the sniffles on Thursday, then by Friday afternoon he had a fever of about 101 and a cough but seemed okay.  I broke out the nebulizer a couple of times for wheezing but it wasn’t nearly as bad as he’s had before.  By Saturday morning he was still coughing with a fever but still seemed okay.  Not eating much but who would want to with such a yucky cough.  Well, he woke up from his nap with a 103.4 fever and was just plain pitiful.  Our pediatrician was closed so we found a local family practice with urgent care hours.  They closed at 3pm, I called at 2:25pm and the nurse said if we come now, they’ll see him.  So we huffed it there and were the last patients of the day.  We were expecting them to say its a virus like docs usually do, or maybe an ear infection since his fever spiked suddenly and that’s how he rolls with ear infections.  We weren’t too worried.

Anyways, the nurse and doctor were really nice.  They took his pulse ox levels, temp, etc.  But all poor Nicholas wanted to do was snuggle on my chest and sleep.  The doc listened to him for a good long time and said he possibly has pneumonia.  Pneumonia?!  Oh, and an ear infection.  Well, at least we were right about one thing.  He sent us for a stat chest x-ray and wrote his home phone number on the orders so the radiologist could call the report to him right away then he’d call us to let us know.  We were super impressed by that!  Especially from a doctor we’ve never seen before at a practice that we’ve never even visited.  He told us to go to the new healthplex about 15 minutes away.  I started to get really worried at that point.  We went right there with our pitiful little man.  Stupid mommy thought we’d be right back home from the doctor’s office and didn’t give him motrin before we left either, so he was still burning up.  It was about 4pm when we got to the healthplex.  We told the receptionist we had stat orders for a chest x-ray for our son.  To which she replied, “No.”.  Um, “No?!”.  And it wasn’t even an apologetic ‘no’.  Very matter of fact, “no”.  She went on to explain that they do not do outpatient x-rays on the weekends.  Well crap.  Annoyed, I ask her where we can go.  She sort of shrugs and suggests the main hospital in Cary.  Great.  So we load up our limp, sad, hot little man and drive the next 15 minutes to the hospital.  That receptionist first tells us we need to go through the ER.  Ugh.  Then says, unless the registration lady hasn’t left yet.  Fortunately she hadn’t, but obviously was on her way and not too pleased to see us show up!  Thankfully we got registered and didn’t wait long for the x-ray.  It took 3 of us in lead vests to hold Nicholas down in the right spot to get the shots they needed.  He was not happy at all.  And I am sure felt like crud.  Finally we were done and on the way home.  We stopped to get his antibiotics and put him right to bed around 6pm.  The doctor called around 7pm and said it wasn’t pneumonia (thank God!) but he does have bad bronchitis.  So he adjusted the dose of bubble gum medicine and told us that if the fever didn’t go down by the morning, to take him to the ER.  Well, this weary, frazzled mom didn’t like to hear that!  It was a rough night because Nicholas was so restless all night long.  But he woke up Sunday with a temp of 100.3 and it stayed around that to 101 all day.  Although he woke up from his short nap in hysterics.  And stayed that way for an entire hour.  We even called the after hours nurse line for advice because he was just so upset.  He wanted to be held, but wouldn’t hold still, kept flailing, screaming, etc.  It was just strange.  We took him outside (in the drizzling rain) and that seemed to snap him out of it and he was fine the rest of the afternoon.  Weird.  He hadn’t eaten a bite of anything on Saturday but did eat some on Sunday.  Sunday night was a little better and he woke up this morning with a perfect temp of 98.6!  And ate a good breakfast.  His cough is hanging around but I imagine that will be here for a little while as he gets rid of that crap in his chest.

So that was our blur of a weekend.  He was feeling good enough to play trains last night and we got some cute pictures of the tunnel going through his “house”.  Hopefully we’ve met our sick quota for awhile and he’ll stay happy and healthy!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 10:20 am and is filed under Kid Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.