My Sick Little Baby Boy!

H1N1 has been ravaging the community lately and we have been very careful to wash hands and take every precaution. I work at the school so I have been especially careful to take a shower after work, use hand sanitizer and the like.

Despite all of our best efforts, Kendall woke up Monday morning with that little tickle in his throat. It soon progressed to the full blown flu and he spent 3 days in complete isolation from the baby. No holding, hugging, nothing.

Three days passed without anyone else in the house feeling sick, then Thursday morning, the worst happened. Little Evan felt HOT! I had been taking his temp ever since daddy got sick and nothing, but this morning I took it and it was 101.6. This picture was taken between tears. I kept thinking, "How could I have let this happen."

We called the doc and they wanted to get him in that day to be seen. We went in to our 2:30 appointment. The doctor recommended that we take Evan to the hospital for a full work up. He got chest x-rays, urine analysis, blood tests and antibiotics.

We had to take him through the E.R. which was particularly frightening. One can't help but feel that if he wasn't already really sick then he could be after this. When they got the results back from the x-ray it showed a possible infiltrate in his left lung (pneumonia.) That is the reason for the antibiotics. Finally after many terrible things had happened to our precious little boy, they diagnosed him with bacterial pneumonia and possible flu and finally let us go home around 7:30 pm.

I couldn't sleep all night. I kept getting up to make sure that Evan was still breathing. He had a restless nights sleep as well and got up many times in the night to eat and then go back to bed. By the morning I was exhausted and they had us coming back in for a 9:30 appointment for another antibiotic shot. We went in, got the shot and talked to the doctor again about how things were going. We were watching Evan for elevated temperature and giving him baby Tylenol just in case. His temp had been down since midnight and I was just praying that it would stay that way.

We live far from town and on that particular day they were having a flu shot clinic at our doctors office so Kendall and I decided to go get our flu shots so we wouldn't risk exposing him to another possible flu strain. There were probably 200 plus people waiting to be seen for the shot, it was insane. After over an hour of waiting it was now past 2:00 in the afternoon and we finally got our shot.

As I was in the exam room I heard some of the nurses talking about me in the hallway saying that my baby's doctor wanted to talk to me. A few minutes later the doctor came in and gave me the bad news that Evan's blood culture draw came back positive for a Staph Infection! He let me know that we would need to go right over to the hospital as soon as he could get it worked out and admit Evan to the Pediatric ward for IV meds and monitoring. I was so upset. How could this happen?

I won't go into details but over two hours later we finally got to go to the hospital. At the hospital things just got worse. They stuck him a total of 5 times trying to get an IV going. The whole time he was bright eyed and appeared fine. He wasn't eating as well and had lost some weight but for the most part he did not look like a little baby that needed to be in the hospital. We saw three different nurses and 5 different doctors, all with a different plan. In the end he got more x-rays, more blood draws and they never were able to start that IV. About midnight the doctors decided to forget about the IV and continue to monitor him. Because he was showing none of the signs of Staph and had no likely way of getting such a thing they ruled it as a contamination in the lab and continued on course to treat the flu and pneumonia. Finally in the afternoon on Saturday we were allowed to take Evan home.

We have him on an antibiotic and a medication for the flu. We are still watching him closely and hoping that anyone reading this will send up a little prayer for our little man. He is a trooper. It hurts my heart to see all the things that he has had to go through in the last couple of days and I hope nothing like this happens for some time to come.

We didn't have our camera at the hospital because we didn't know when we left the house on Friday morning that we wouldn't be coming home until Saturday night. This is Evan's little foot with his hospital tag just after we got home from the hospital.

This is Evan on his blanket from the hospital. There is a project called the "Linus Project" and it's a group of women who make blankets and give toys to little boys and girls that end up in the hospital. The generosity and thoughtfulness of this brought tears to our eyes and we will cherish these mementos for some time to come.

Some good came during our time of trial. Evan smiled at me for the first time. He's given small smiles before but this was an all out full hearted "I love you mama" smile. It filled my heart and I will never forget it.