well those of you that read my twitter or facebook feeds, already know about the drama of the past 4 days. but i thought i’d blog about it anyway, cuz i feel like writing out the whole story.
so maeven started complaining about a sore throat the end of last week…maybe friday or saturday, don’t remember exactly. by sunday she was crying about it. and by sunday night, she was crying hard about it and didn’t sleep well sunday night. monday morning i called her ped’s office and made an appt.
the verdict from mary, the ped nurse practitioner, was that it wasn’t strep (they swabbed her). and although one of her tonsils was significantly larger than the other, and that was the side that hurt the most, she said that it didn’t seem to be an infection. said it was a virus, and she recommended alternating acetomenophen and ibuprofen to help with the pain and ride it out.
another rough night and tuesday was pure misery. her pain was obviously more as evidenced by the sobbing fits and grabbing her throat. looking at her throat the tonsil in question was significantly larger still. and the pain meds didn’t seem to do much to help her. i ended up calling the ped again and asked what to do. they said i may want to wait til morning and then take her to children’s hospital ER. she thought they’d probably want me to come back again in the morning when the ear, nose and throat office opened, so better to go and get it all done in one trip.
i should note that maeven still did not have a fever…if she had, we all would have been much more alarmed. but her pain tolerance is about nill, so she was really howling by tuesday evening.
i had to make a trip to target tuesday evening in preparation for the evening from hell. our boom box broke the night before (figures), and maeven really relies upon listening to stories on it to help her sleep. now was not the time to wean her from that, so i went and bought a cheap alarm clock/cd player at target so as to avoid more stress for her evening. also got some more pain killers because one that i had gotten she was also refusing because of the taste (orange ibuprofen tablets apparently are pretty nasty), so i got her some grape liquid to avoid that battle. and when i got home i put adam in charge of getting onto itunes and downloading and burning a new cd of stories for the night. thank god because it really did help during a difficult night.
so tuesday night i planned for the worst night yet, and i was right…and i slept in her bed next to her as she woke every hour/hour and half crying from the pain and i had to put stories on, rub her back and talk soothingly to get her back to sleep. at this point she was refusing pain meds. they weren’t really helping anyway, so i didn’t fight that battle.
at 4am wed morning she woke up just WRITHING and HOWLING in pain. seriously like a raving lunatic. thrashing and hitting the bed and crying so hard she nearly was screaming. that was it, i packed us up and headed to the children’s hospital ER. luckily, adam was able to take off the next morning from work to stay home with tyren, in anticipation of me needing to take maeve to the hospital.
at the hospital, after swabbing for strep again (came back negative, of course), they xrayed maeve’s throat to check for an abscess. (which i learned through this experience is an infected area. they thought her large tonsil may have been infected.) no abscess. well that was good news.
they finally gave her tylenol w/codeine and she was a new child. they sent us home to have her drink lots of fluid and take tylenol w/codeine as needed. we got home wed morning about 6:45am.
incidentally, that was my first trip to children’s hospital ER and i was very happy with the experience. i know they normally have a super long wait, but at 4am it wasn’t too bad. only 5 or 6 kids. and i was happy with how kid-friendly everything was, and all the people were. 🙂
so we went home and crashed out in bed again…i woke up at 9am to her howling in pain again. odd, because she had had the tylenol w/codeine at 6:15, less than 3hours before. very disheartening. i had to jump up and run to the pharmacy to fill her prescription (pharmacies weren’t open yet when we came home, i checked). adam called in the middle of my waiting for the prescription to be filled to tell me she was crying for me. *sigh* my poor baby.
finally got home and we still had to wait to give her the medicine! they said its really supposed to be given every 6hours, but this one time i could do 4hours. and that was still 45min away!! talk about a long 45min! but we made it and she got it and quickly fell asleep.
wednesday was full of crying and sleeping. i called her ped several times, starting in the morning, because i was really worried about how to make it through even one day (and i didn’t know how many more days we’d have to go through this) with her being back in pain like 2 or 3 hours after taking the tylenol/codeine and we had to wait 6hours before she could have another dose!! they FINALLY called back at the end of the work day and said i could give ibuprofen when she needed it, in addition to the tylenol/codeine. but by then she was better, and i never had to. we made it through it, thank god.
that evening (still wed/yesterday) i had a meeting for the discovery center board so adam was worried that maeven would freak again while i was gone…but everything went wonderful because apparently we’d made it over the hump of her pain by then because she was starting to act more normal again. and i also dosed her with tylenol/codeine just before adam got home and i had to leave.
and she had a great night, thanks to codeine, LOL, and this morning woke up nearly normal again. and no meds at all so far today. yay!
so that’s the drama of this week around here. thank god we are past the worst of it now, yay! 🙂
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