Sick baby

Well we had our first real sickness with Ronan this weekend. It started out with a slight fever and a little congestion on Saturday. Nothing too scary and I thought it might be teething-related (it'll be nice when he finally does cut a tooth and I can actually know when he really is teething), so we gave him a little Tylenol and went from there. That night, it got a lot worse and he was up every hour or two. Tom was at work, of course, so I was getting pretty ragged and a little worried that he was getting worse. The next morning, his fever was around 102, so I decided to stay home from church and try to get him to rest. We called the doctor's office and they said to just keep an eye on him and if his temp got up to 105 to go to the emergency room.

I spent most of the morning nursing and trying to get Ronan to sleep, with very little success. He'd be able to drift off for about 10-15 minutes, but then he'd wake up coughing. He sounded absolutely terrible. Around 3 p.m., he fell asleep on my lap and slept for about half-an-hour. When he woke up, he was burning and I took his temperature - 105. I took it again and it was 104.8. But what really got me nervous was that for the first time he wasn't upset that I was taking his temp. I woke Tom up and we headed to the ER.

By the time we got there, Ronan was doing a little better. We had put a cool washcloth on his head and that seemed to help his temp come down. It was 103 by the time the nurse took it. We had a student nurse practitioner come in and take a look at him. She said his ears looked good, and it was probably just an upper respiratory infection, but his lungs were clear, so that was good. The nurse practitioner came in and told us the same thing and recommended just giving him Tylenol every four hours or so. We took Ronan home and eventually got him to sleep (Tom called in to work to take the night off when we were going to the hospital). He slept for a couple hours, but was still waking up pretty often. I went in to nurse him at around 1 a.m. and fell asleep in the chair in his room until about 4:30. When I woke up, I noticed that he was much cooler and sure enough, his fever had broken. He's doing much better today, though he's still congested. He's much more active and happy. So all's well that ends well. I kept him home from daycare today (my professor I work for told me not to worry about coming in, which I was very grateful for) and he's currently napping (knock on wood). So now I'm off to try to catch up on all the work I had hoped to do over the weekend.