Feveral Seizure

About two weeks ago, Jellybean started getting a runny nose.  I figured, it's gotta be the teething, right?  The following Sunday, that runny nose turned into a yucky cough.  Uh-oh,we must be catching a cold.  So Monday after work, we went to see the doctor.  Just a touch of bronchitis, caught in time before it got bad.  A little antibiotic should do the trick.  So we went home.

Tuesday night, it was obvious she wasn't feeling her best.  But of course, teething combined with acute bronchitis will do that to a kid.  So she took her medicine and some Infants' Motrin before bed.  She woke up and fussed a few times throughout the night, but put herself back to sleep within minutes and all was well.
Until Wednesday morning.

I went in to get her out of bed around 7:30 a.m.--I was running late--and I saw her laying on her side, making strange motions.  As I got closer, my little baby girl in her purple Dora PJ's wasn't just moving strangely, she was jerking.  I picked her up, her eyes rolled into the back of her head.  I lost it. 

~~A bit of an intermission here to explain how God puts the right people in my life at the exact right time.  One thing I haven't been advertising publicly is that since we went to divorce court, I've been spending a great deal of time with one of my best friends from high school, a guy we will call Ant.  We have been close friends since we were 15.  Now he has full custody of two little boys ages 2 and 1, and an ex that is only slightly more useful than mine.  So we have a lot in common.  While the boys were at their mom's for the night, Ant came to stay with me.~~

I screamed for Ant, who later told me that he thought he was coming to rescue me from a spider.  All sensibility I had flew right out the window.  He very calmly took Jellybean from my arms, explained to me that she was having a seizure, and proceeded to take care of her while I ran to get Babysitter from next door.  I used Babysitter's cell phone to call the ambulance, because my brain was too scrambled to find my own phone. 

After a few minutes, the seizure subsided.  Ant ran outside to grab the ambulance that had missed my street.  They took us to the hospital, where Ant met us.  Everything happened so quickly.  She had to have an IV inserted, and got a dose of 1/2 milligram (I think?) of Adavan to prevent anymore seizures.  During her posticus (the phase after a seizure where one is "loopy") she was staring straight ahead and wouldn't respond to us.  I thought for a moment that she had gone blind.  They had to insert a catheter to take a urine sample.  When they came in to do a chest xray, she had another seizure.  When this was over, they had to give her a spinal tap so that they could obtain fluid to test for meningitis.  They gave her another 1/2 miligram of Adavan.  My head was spinning. 

I snapped at several doctors and argued with them about the spinal tap.  When the xray technician came back to finish the chest xray, I blew up at him.  I'm not really sure why, other than the fact that I was freaking out.  He left the room and a few minutes later, another technician came in to finish the job.  Somewhere along the way, blood was drawn for testing. 

My parents rushed up.  The doctors were preparing us for the worst.  He told us how we would treat meningitis.  He explained different types of seizure disorders.  For a minute, I wondered if Jellybean was going to make it.  The most horrifying feelings swept over me.

Hours later, we were admitted into the children's wing of the hospital.  Bright blue floor tiles and dinosaur wallpaper cannot take away the depression of staring at a hospital crib.  All the tests came back negative, and it was declared a complex feveral seizure.  They determined that she had some unknown virus, causing her fever to spike quickly, which can lead to a seizure.

Her fever spiked up and down for the next two days.  We spent all of Thanksgiving in the hospital, as well as the entire day before and a good bit of the day after.  We watched Dora's Super Silly Fiesta over and over.  For three days. 

Finally, they were ready to let us go home on Friday.  Of course, being the day after a holiday, the doctor didn't want to get his lazy ass into the hospital at 8:00 a.m. that morning like, you know, all of the nurses, aides and other employees did.  All morning I had been asking the nurses to call the doctor in so we could get permission to remove her IV.  It had been disconnected from the bag since Thursday, but they left the needle in her inner-elbow just in case they needed to get back to it.  They would not remove the needle without the doctor's permission.  The doctor would not get his lazy ass into the hospital.  The nurses would not call the doctor.  I gathered what was left of my mind from the past few days and I lost it again.  I told them that if they did not take that damn needle out of my baby's arm RIGHT NOW then I would be removing it MYSELF!

Ten minutes later, the needle was out and Jellybean was SO happy to have her arm back.  That's right... Momma knows how to get shit done.

By lunchtime, the doctor came in.  I asked him one more time to PLEASE check her ears, I thought something might be wrong.  He almost laughed at me as he walked off to grab his equipment.  He looked at her ears and said that there was nothing wrong.

We went home, and Jellybean was doing better, but that darn fever kept coming back.  So Monday morning, we followed up with our family doctor, who checked her ears and said they looked great.  Tuesday morning, I got Jellybean up and LO AND BEHOLD her ears are leaking a clear fluid.  Who could have seen that coming?  Oh yeah... me!

We went BACK to the family doctor--only because the ear/nose/throat specialist didn't have any openings today--who put her on an antibiotic.  Again.  By yesterday, the fluid had turned a yellowish-brown color, which tells me that the infection has probably been in that ear for some time.

I. Am. Pissed.  How can so many doctors look into a child's ear and not realize that it is horribly infected?  How can they just rule it out even though I tell them specifically?  WTF!?

She went to the pediatric ear/nose/throat specialist on Friday and we will be going this Thursday to have tubes put in her ears.  She will then have to have her hearing tested to see if we lost any hearing, which would explain why her vocabulary is so limited compared to other children her age.

And we will be switching doctors.