My Sick Baby

Well, I'm sure everyone has heard the story already, but for those of you that haven't...
By your 5th child you are pretty relaxed about things like fevers. When Grace woke up from her nap warm, I said "hmm, must be teeth" and gave her a little Acetaminophen and we headed over to Amy's for a walk. Grace is always so happy even through illness that it was hard to see the seriousness in it. But in my defence - I really don't think she was feeling too bad at this point. So we took a nice long walk in the summer sun, came home and put her down for her nap in her nice hot bedroom (well, I turned the fan on)and I left for work.
5 o'clock rolled around and I got a phone call. It was Tony but I could barely hear him.

Static... "Grace" static static "emergency room" static "need to get over here" static...silence. I lost the call.
I quickly called home and Courtney answered, crying hysterically, "Mommy, I don't know what happened, We were outside and Daddy came home and Grace, I don't know! I don't know what happened!" Then Paige took the phone "Mommy (sob,sob)" "Paige put Me ma on the phone right now!" "She's not here, She went to the hospital with Daddy."

You can imagine what was going through my mind.

What had happened is that while taking her nap, her fever came back too quickly and it caused a febrile seizure. When I arrived at the hospital, that part of it was all over. They kept her there for a few hours until the pediatric ambulance from Strong came. I told the driver that this was only my second time riding in an ambulance. He said "Yeah? This is my first." Pretty sure he was kidding.

All the nurses at Strong loved Grace. Well maybe they act that way for everyone but they sure made us feel comfortable. One nurse came in and said "Oh, Becky was right! She is super cute!" Another told us that there was a note on her chart calling her a "darling baby girl". She was amazing through all of the testing and weighing and measuring and poking and prodding. They came in at 2 in the morning and woke her up to give her a catheter. The nurse urged us to leave the room (yeah right) but to every one's surprise, she never made a sound!
"Is she always this good?"
Yup, she sure is.

The only trouble we had with her is trying to keep her hands off those wires, especially the one with the red light on it attached (not very well) to her toe. I woke up once and looked over at her in the crib, she was sitting up, her face illuminated by the red light, concentrating on it as she waved it slowly side to side, while the monitor ding, ding, dinged for the nurse that the connection was lost. Several times I looked for the silence button for that machine but I don't think it has one.



Wednesday during the day she spiked a fever several times. We came home in the late afternoon with instructions to keep the Tylenol and Motrin going for a few days until she was better. She slept very well that night at home (right next to me, of course) and went all night and all day today fever free! Now she's pretty much back to normal, giggly and playing with the kids. We all are thankful to God for bringing our Grace home safe and healthy.

Thank you everyone for your prayers.