Last Monday saw our first trip to the emergency room with Jace. He had a cold all weekend and on Sunday started to run a fever. No big deal we thought, dosing him up with tylenol. Monday he still had a fever so I stayed home from work with him. After his morning tylenol dose he seemed fairly bouncy so we ran to the grocery store to pick up a few things. Okay, I confess, it was a desperate ploy to distract a very whiny kid. He had been in a constant state of whine since Sunday morning and I was beginning to go a little crazy. He fell asleep on the way home from the store but as I had to wake him up to take off his jacket and shoes, I gave him another dose of tylenol before putting him down for a real nap. When he woke up 2 hrs later he had high fever despite the tylenol. At a loss of what to do I called the pediatrician. Try Children’s Motrin they suggested, and call us back in an hour and let us know if his temperature has gone down.

After a frantic rush to CVS, I took his temperature again (let me tell you, Jace was not pleased at this) and gave him the Motrin. 1 hour of floppy (he was past whiny at this point and just floppy and sad looking) kid later and his temperature was down a whopping .6 degrees (it was 103.3 for those who want to know how high a kid’s fever gets). Called the doctor’s office and they told us to head to Winchester Hospital Emergency Room. Winchester is a neighborhood hospital who happens to have the forethought (or budget?) to have a Children’s Hospital Pediatrician continually at the hospital. All the pediatricians in the area know this and no matter what hospital they are affiliated with, they send you to Winchester because that is where they go with their kids.

Winchester was fabulous and the nurses had us out of the waiting room and seeing the doctor within half an hour of arriving. After listening to his lungs (Jace had his usual nasty cough to go with his cold) they decided he needed a chest xray to check for pneumonia, nasal swap to check for flu, and blood draw to check for whatever they check for in your blood. Getting a chest xray (or rather two) of a small child who doesn’t sit still is a challenge but they were wonderfully patient and clearly had done this before. Diagnosis…”a touch of pneumonia”. Jace then got to have IV antibiotics to attempt to jump start his battle against the germs and they wanted to monitor him for a couple of hours to see if his temperature came down with the additional dose of tylenol and the antibiotics.  Getting the IV in was easier than I thought, mostly due to the “child life specialist” who basically is a nice lady who brings toys and talks with sick kids to try to make things easier for them and their parents. She had a ton of distraction toys (things that light up, spin or make noise) to use with Jace while the nurses started the IV. He general was a trooper about the whole thing and we saved turning the TV on until we needed him to sit still for the IV antibotics to be administered. Cartoon Network did its job.

After a couple of hours, he definitely seemed to be feeling a lot better and the doctor decided we could go home provided we promised to take him to his primary care doctor in the morning or come back to the ER if he started to have problems breathing. For a trip to the ER, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be although hopefully we won’t be back anytime soon.

And yes, Jace is now back to his running, jumping, giggling self.

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