How One of My Middle Children Gets Quality Time

Thank you so much for kind thoughts yesterday. You have no idea how much they helped--esp. because yesterday Sarah still hurt and needed some intense narcotics for pain. A little child in pain is just the worst.

Sarah came home from school as talkative as ever. Happy and hungry.

She ate about two bites of food and suddenly declared she was no longer hungry.

Then she had a stomach ache.

Then she fell asleep at 5 in the afternoon.

Then she refused dinner.

Then started to cry in pain. I brought a trash can to her bed thinking she got a stomach bug.

Then she got a fever.

I ran through her symptoms. Severe pain on her lower right torso and a fever and nothing else. I knew it could be  a number of things but there was one thing it could be, her appendix. And at a little after 11 I was driving my shivering, reeling in pain, little girl to the ER. Just her and mommy.

We got to the ER and the poking and prodding began. They brought us straight to a room via a wheel chair--the pain was so bad she could no longer walk. Then the pricking began and Sarah begged to nurse to make it not hurt. She was given a weird dye to drink and the doctor took me aside and said he thought it was her appendix. 

I was horrified.

The nurse asked her to pee in a cup and Sarah got very upset. 

The nurse asked if it hurt to pee.

"Only a little, maybe more," Sarah paused. "Only one or two or three times."

I sighed, a bladder infection. All this pain and a fever from a bladder infection. I could only hope that was the real problem.

We did x-rays for possible walking pneumonia (I still don't get this since she did not have a cough or anything.) and she was getting weaker and harder to keep calm by the second.

And then some results came back. She did have a bladder infection and, thank the Lord, her white blood cell count was OK. They thought it was merely a bladder infection.

The doctor mentioned getting her antibiotics and then looked at Sarah.

"To be safe, you should take her to her doctor this afternoon," he looked at her again. "Actually I'd bring her in as soon as they open."

I looked at Sarah. She was in real pain. I had had bladder infections before. I was never in this type of pain.

I looked at the doctor and made that pricey decision, "Ya know, I'd sleep better if we could rule out her appendix with the cat scan. She's already forced herself to drink that dye (she could not eat or drink anything without feeling sick) and since we are already here...."

The doctor nodded, "Better safe than sorry."

I looked at my poor Sarah.

She was in real honest to goodness pain.

I asked the doctor if she could take anything for the pain. And almost never even give my kids Tylenol (the last time was last year during our chicken pox festival).

Both the nurse and doctor agreed. Our room was right in front of the main ER desk and they heard her crying and saw the tears rolling down her cheeks.

The nurse inserted morphine in the tube in her arm. Slowly, she was not hurting as bad.

"But I still hurt a little," she whispered as I pulled to front curtain and turned down the lights.

I pulled out my iphone and we watched 'Cars' as we waited for the cat scan.

The cat scan was weird. More injections in her tube and a tech who kept asking why I didn't take Sarah to a children's hospital.

Like a broken record I kept repeating 'because she was screaming in pain and I was not about to drive for 40 more minutes than I needed to so she could see a doctor' but by the fifth time he asked I just shrugged and agreed next time.

Back in the room, I turned on the TV and Sarah giggled at 'Good Eats'--she loves that goofy show.

And finally at almost 4, we got the final results. The appendix appeared normal and the final diagnosis was bladder infection. YAY! I asked if this much pain is normal and the nurse told me it can be even worse. So I'll say we were very lucky.

Driving home all I thought about was getting into bed. It was odd that if this was a normal night, I'd be getting up in half an hour for spin  class (not happening today or even this day!) and then Sarah asked if we could watch a movie together.

"We could watch Christmas because you love Christmas,"she smiled. The morphine was really kicked in!

So we dropped off the prescriptions and drove home to watch Elf.

I watched the baby climb into Santa's bag and suddenly Buddy is opening a present with maple syrup. I am guessing I slept through a bit of it ;)

But I looked over at Sarah and she was smiling.

"This is fun mommy."

I really need to spend more time with her without doctors and nurses :)