She's Too Little for This!

The past several days have been quite busy for us. Wednesday night, Jared went to play basketball at the church, and I told him while he was gone I got my first experience of what it is truly like to have two kids. Until that point, things had gone very smoothly, but that particular night, both girls decided to scream and cry at the same time. Taylor had spent the whole day with her Aunt Say-say (how are you supposed to spell that?). She had a great time, of course, and I enjoyed having a little break. I imagined getting tons and tons of stuff done, but of course, Bella decided to demand a little more attention than usual, so I didn't get quite as much done as I had hoped. Thank you, Sarah, for stealing her away and for dinner! I know you have your hands full as it is! Anyway, Taylor didn't have a nap that day, so shortly after Jared left for basketball, I tried to put Taylor in bed. I figured she would be so tired that she wouldn't put up a fight, but I was wrong. She was screaming and crying the whole time I was changing her diaper and putting on her pajamas to get her ready for bed. Then, Bella starts crying. I take Taylor back to her room where she continues to scream and cry. I sit in the rocking chair with her. She finally calms down, but by this point, Bella is screaming as loud as she can. I finally get Taylor in bed, and by the time I was done, Bella had cried herself to sleep. It was pretty stressful for a little bit, but it's something I have to get used to, I guess. When Taylor was a baby, I could never just let her cry. It just broke my heart. I am quickly learning that sometimes you just have to let them cry. Otherwise, you will go crazy. It still tugs at my heart if Bella is crying but I'm having to do something with Taylor, but she tends to only cry for a little while and then calms down and falls asleep.


So... I thought Wednesday night was a bit stressful, but I had no idea what was coming.... Thursday morning, I thought Bella felt pretty hot when she woke up, but I thought maybe it was just because she had been bundled up in blankets all night. We have a thermometer somewhere in our house, but every time I find it, Taylor gets a hold of it and hides it somewhere else. So, I didn't know where our thermometer was, but we were going over to Cari's house for GC, so I stuck some Tylenol in my purse and decided I would just take her temp at Cari's. When we got there, I handed Bella to Misty and asked if she felt warm to her, and she said yes. So, we took her temp, and it was 101.1. I almost started crying that very second because I had a pretty good suspicion of what was coming, but I tried to be calm, and I gave her some Tylenol and went and called our doctor's office. Our family doctor happened to be out of town, so we made an appointment with one of his partners. The appointment wasn't until 2:30, so I was very anxious all morning. Gratefully, Cari offered to watch Taylor while I took Bella to the doctor.

By the time we got to the doctor's office, her temp was about down to normal, but she still felt warm to me, and the nurse there said she felt warm to her, too. When the doctor came in the room, I told him what her temp was, and before he even examined her, he looked at me and said, "She's going to have to go into the hospital." I immediately started crying because my fears had been confirmed. He apologized for being so blunt, but I said it was okay because I was pretty much expecting it; I was just hoping I was wrong. He was going to have her directly admitted to the hospital, but in order to speed up the process and get all of her tests started right away, he sent us over to the Pediatric ER.

When they first checked her temp at the ER, it was 100.5, so it was starting to go back up. They started an IV, drew blood work and blood cultures, did a cath urine, did a chest x-ray, and did a spinal tap. Basically, babies that young don't usually show a lot of symptoms when they're sick, so they have to test them for everything imaginable. I told Bella that at least her big sister waited two years before she had to go to the hospital. Bella only waited two weeks!




While we were waiting to be admitted, Jared went home to pack our bags and take stuff to Cari for Taylor to spend the night. They finally got us upstairs to a room around 9:00pm, I guess. I fed Taylor at 10:00pm, but she ended up throwing everything up. She did the same thing the previous Monday night, but it was just one time, so we didn't think anything of it. When she did it this time, I was afraid it might have something to do with her being sick, so we told the nurse, and the nurse said to hold off feeding her for a couple of hours and then give her some Pedialyte. Around midnight, I gave her some Pedialyte, and at first, she started chugging the whole bottle. Then, she would push away from it but still be fussy. Around 1:00am, I gave her another little Pedialyte bottle. The nurse came back in and asked how she was doing. I told her that she took the Pedialyte but was being pretty fussy. She said she would come back and check on her in another hour, and if she was still being fussy, she would call the doctor. We could just tell that she was hungry, but Pedialyte was NOT what she wanted. Finally, around 2:00am, I decided to go ahead and feed her. She kept everything down fine and finally fell asleep. It was a very rough night- not to mention they only had one very small, very uncomfortable couch that would stretch out so ONE person could sleep on it, and Jared and I both tried to squeeze on there.


The next morning, I noticed a tiny spot of bright red blood in her diaper. If she had actually been bleeding from her intestinal tract, then it would not have been bright red blood, but I showed it to the doctor, and he asked a GI doctor to come see her. The GI doctor came and talked to us for a few minutes but said that he really didn't think he was needed and didn't like to do tests just for the sake of doing tests. My mom was so sweet to come and stay with me all day while Jared was at work. I tried to nap here and there, but every time I would doze off, the nurse or someone else would come in the room.

Jared is taking online classes, and he had a research paper and two finals due that same weekend, so he decided that he would spend the night at home Friday night so he could work on all of that. Taylor spent the night with my brother and his family. They have two boys, so my sis-in-law Sarah was loving having a girl to play with. The doctor called our hospital room late that afternoon and told me Bella's blood cultures had come back fine (all of the tests up to this point were normal), but her urine culture came back positive for E. coli and he was going to order an ultrasound of her kidneys and ask a urologist to come see her. He asked if I had any questions, but all I could think to ask him was if we would still be able to go home the next day as we were originally told or if it would depend on the ultrasound. Of course, he said it would depend on the ultrasound.

I called Jared to tell him what the doctor had said, and we both started to get pretty worried. I mean, everything you usually hear about E. coli is really serious, and we weren't sure how she had gotten it. My mom called one of her brothers who is an anesthesiologist, and he basically told her that we shouldn't worry because this was something that's actually pretty common and it wasn't the same E. coli like with food poisoning-- it was basically just a UTI. So, we all felt a little relieved after hearing that.

Jared and my mom had brought some movies up to the hospital for me to watch so I wasn't too incredibly bored. I watched The Secret Life of Bees and Bedtime Stories which were both good. They did the ultrasound right in our room around 7:00 or 8:00 pm. The nurse said the doctor told her to call him that night if the results showed something abnormal- but he did not expect that- otherwise he said he would just be by in the morning. Once again, I didn't get any sleep between waking up to feed Bella and the nurse and tech coming in and out of the room.

The nurse came in at 5:00am to draw some blood work and then I fed Bella. Just as I had gotten her back to sleep around 6:00am, the tech came in to weigh her, so of course she had to get her all unwrapped and everything. (She was 8 lbs 4 oz, by the way!) I got her back to sleep and didn't have long to sleep myself before the doctor came in. One of our family doctor's other partners was on call the next day, so when he came in, he said the urine culture was positive for gram negative bacteria (which I guess they were just assuming was E. coli at the time), so they wanted to wait another day until they identified the specific bacteria (best to be on the cautious side of everything- if the infection were to spread to her bloodstream, she could get really sick, really fast). Great- another day in the hospital! I asked him if this was something that maybe she had gotten from her stool getting in/on/near her urethra (that's pretty common for little girls). He said that was possible, but also, E. coli is one of the natural bacteria on our bodies. Usually when we urinate, we flush it out of our system, but it could be that it just didn't get flushed out so it caused her to have a urinary tract infection. He reassured me that there was nothing I could have done differently. He said it was just bad luck- some babies could sit in a dirty diaper for hours and never get a UTI. He was really great about explaining things. He explained that there are valves between the kidneys and the bladder that allow urine to go from the kidneys to the bladder but are supposed to keep the urine from refluxing from the bladder back up into the kidneys. He said the urologist may want to do an additional test-a VCUG- that would test the functioning of the urinary tract and make sure those valves are working correctly.

The doctor also said that her potassium had come back really high, but he believed that it was only because the nurse had to work hard at squeezing her heel to get the blood to come out and the blood had probably hemolyzed. If her potassium had actually been that high, it would have caused heart arrythmias. However, he said that it would be bad for it to actually be high and not do anything to treat it. I understood that they would have to redraw the blood just to be sure, so the day shift nurse came in later to redraw the blood, and it came back much better.

The urologist came in shortly after the family doctor was there. The on call urologist was not the pediatric urologist. He said they may do the VCUG, but they would have to wait until the infection was cleared up before they did it. He said at this point they would just want the ultrasound to make sure everything looked good with the kidneys, and everything did. So, he just told us to call on Monday to make an appointment with his partner, the pediatric urologist.

Jared got up that morning and worked on his paper some more, and then he came up to the hospital later that afternoon. My mom also came first thing that morning to keep me company again. Neal and Sarah brought Taylor up that afternoon to visit. When Taylor saw Bella's arm and how they had it wrapped up where her IV was, she said, "It hurt. It hurt." She kept getting Oreos from Grandma and crawling under Bella's bed. If we had lowered the rail on the other side of the bed, she would have been trapped in there like she was in a cage.


She also got some good use out of a little car that she could sit in and "drive" that they had available there on the pediatric floor. Really, she gave Grandma a good work out pushing that car up and down the hallways. After that, she clearly needed a nap- Taylor, not Grandma, although Grandma may have wanted one too after all that... haha- because she was being incredibly fussy so Neal and Sarah took her back to their house, and she spent the night with them again. Jared stayed the night at the hospital that night. The tech found us a recliner, but it ended up being worse than the couch, so Jared ended up putting a bunch of pillows on the floor, which believe it or not, he said was more comfortable than the couch.

Sunday morning, the doctor came in and asked if we were ready to go home!! Of course! The culture definitely came back as E. coli. He wrote us a prescription for antibiotics to give her at home, and we were discharged between 10:30 and 11:00 am. We were so happy to get out of there. I took Bella home, and Jared went to get Taylor. I was going to drop off the prescription at a pharmacy near our house, and Jared was going to pick it up on his way home. The two pharmacies near our house were not open at the time that I went by, so I figured we could just go by there later. Jared went later that afternoon and was told that the antibiotic that was prescribed was not a common one, and they didn't have it in stock. We then called around to just about every pharmacy in town that we could think of, and no one had that specific antibiotic in stock. So we had to call the doctor's office's answering service and have them page the doctor, and the doctor called in a different prescription for us, but he didn't call it in to one of the pharmacies close to our house because by this time they were about to close for the day, so he called it into a pharmacy in town that he knew stayed open late. Luckily, some friends of ours from church offered to bring us dinner that night, so that was one less thing we had to worry about.

Bella is doing very well now. She's had no fever since the hospital, and she never really acted sick in the first place. She takes her antibiotic very well especially if we give it to her when she's really hungry ;-) Taylor, on the other hand, does not like it when I give Bella the antibiotic. The first time she saw me, she said, "Ewww... no mommy! no!!" and then hit me on the head... haha She's being protective of her little sister already. She has actually started to get very sweet with Bella and likes to give her hugs and kisses.

Since our stay in the hospital, I have been trying to get caught up on some rest. Being sleep deprived comes with the terrority of having a newborn, and the hospital stay just really added to that. Speaking of sleep... I've been trying to finish this post for a few days, and I'm up way too late trying to get it done, and now Bella is crying, so I'm off.....