labor day

So much for a fun family day off. That is what we had hoped for, but Dominique started running fever yesterday and as the day wore on, the fever got more and more ferocious. I called the on-call doctor just after midnight. I had given her a dose of Tylenol at 8pm and was going to go check on her and give her some Motrin to take her through the night, only to find that she was burning up and had thrown up at some point without me even knowing it. I cleaned her, stripped her bed and got things rinsed and bleached, but when I tried to give her the Motrin, she threw it up. I usually try to keep fevers under 103, but she was running 104.6F and even a bath only cooled her off for about 15-30min. afterwards.

The doctor on call was not helpful at all. I wanted to know how to get her fever down or if I needed to take her in to the emergency and he acted like I was some dumb mom who woke him up for a little thing. He told me fevers are the body's way to fight off something and to just make her comfortable and give her clear liquids. That didn't make much sense to me, but I thought they'd say the same thing at emergency. But since I didn't want to keep her around 104, we spent a horrid night with me trying to wash her down and a couple of times dunking her in the tub through the night. I was able to get her temp. down some from time to time, to 103 or so, but it kept going up to 104.6F. I bathed her again at about 6am and we went back to bed. When we awoke at 9am, she was really hot- 105.4F, and hallucinating, (which I used to do with high fevers as a kid too), so I took her in to the emergency.

I wish I had done that in the first place last night. It was a night and day difference from the doc. on call. I told them her temp. and they saw us right away, gave her tylenol by supository and Motrin orally. Within the hour we were seen by a super nice doctor and understanding nurses- who couldn't believe what the on call doc. had said and stressed that anything near 105 is bad (which I had known, but stupidly refered to the doc.). One nurse told me, if it happened again to ask the doc. to call in the tylenol supository. I didn't even know those existed, but took her in since I figured they had to have something better than baths.

She has an inner ear infection and we aren't sure why everything progressed so quickly or viciously, but they gave her an antibiotic shot and she is wonderfully cool now. We've been sleeping the rest of the day away and I'm so thankful I don't have the extra boys and that Brian was here to hang with Ivan and go get Dominique's prescription filled. They warned me that the next couple of days could still be rough with fevers, but gave me a big wad of take home info. on keeping fevers manageable and I'm sure it can't get as bad as this morning.

On her good days, she is such a charmer. We have worked on learning a good section of 1 Cor. 13- the love chapter in the bible and I was wanting to get her to sing the song we made to learn it. In the first video, she changed the program on me when I started filming. In the second is 1 Cor. 13, take 59. You can tell she'd had enough of it by the end!