Back to the Lab Again, Yo

I got home from my Families with Children from China (and other parts of Asia)* Ladies Night Out and Holiday Ornament Exchange at about 10:00 last night. Husband said that Gabriel had complained of chills before bed. I went in to check on him and he was like a furnace. I took his temperature and it was 106.1. ONE HUNDRED AND SIX POINT ONE.

Husband gave him 200mg of ibuprofen and I paged the doctor who asked if he was "breathing quickly" on top of the fever. I said, "yes, he is breathing quickly and shallowly" and the doctor said, “get in the car right now and go to the ER.”

So, to the ER we went.

Where they gave him 300 mg of Tylenol on top of the 200 mg of ibuprofen. They took his blood in a screaming horrible scene that I don’t want to think about ever again. They took a chest xray and a urine sample and various other sundry tests.

And when all was said and done, they said they didn’t know what was wrong. They knew it wasn’t strep and it wasn’t pneumonia and it wasn’t a bladder infection and his white counts were normal, but, he was running a fever in the neighborhood of 106 degrees and his heart rate was elevated "slightly" and that it was “probably a virus”.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that medicine is very far away from an exact science.

(I have mentioned before that my uncle is a physician. It would be nice to be able to call him and ask his opinion, however, he has chosen to live as a mission doctor in some godforsaken outpost of African grassland, so, he was unavailable for consult.)

At 1:45 AM, after the ibuprofen and the Tylenol and one more dose of ibuprofen for good measure, and two popsicles and a glass of Sprite, Gabe’s fever was down to normal and they sent us home.

I put him in bed at 2:00 AM. At 2:10 AM he was up crying hysterically about some lizards and the bathtub drain. (?!?). I put him in the guestroom bed and crawled in with him, and my family slept like the dead until 8:45 this morning, when I had to haul my sorry self out of bed to be in court by 9:30. Where I looked quite pathetically bedraggled.

I’m tired. I want to go back to bed and sleep for a long time. But, I have 150 cases pending that I need to deal with before I get on a plane two weeks from today, so, that’s not going to happen.

LM

*We just call ourselves the FCC group, because the FCC(AOPOA) group is just too cumbersome.