Sam’s Story: Week 36

This week’s story is subtitled “Sam’s Craptastic Trip to the Emergency Room.”

Sometime Friday afternoon Sam started to run a fever. It was mild and Ger’s call to the pediatrician only yielded advice to keep an eye on it and give her Tylenol. So we did, but by early Saturday afternoon the fever was getting alarmingly hot. Holding Sam felt like holding a hot water bottle. The kind that cries a lot and spits its oatmeal back at you when you try to feed it.

Despite the Tylenol, the fever got over 100°, then over 102°, and when it topped 104° we packed it in and headed for the Urgent Care facility. When we got there, they told us that “Wow, 104 is high” and that we should go to the E.R. forthwith. So we did.

When we got there and checked in, the receptionist told us to strip Sam down to the diaper and wait for someone to admit her to triage so they could check things out. So we stripped Sam down and sat in the crowded waiting room, feeling like total rednecks for carrying our ill-tempered baby out in public wearing nothing but a diaper.

When the doctor admitted us to triage, it was the unfortunate beginning of things being stuffed into places where things aren’t normally stuffed. But on the plus side, according to the doctor who administered it, up the butt is “easily the best way” to take Tylenol. So we had been doing it wrong all along, but based on Sam’s reaction to the application of his advice, I think she prefers “the second best way” by a country mile.

Sadly, that wasn’t the end to the invasive cramming of things into Sam’s privates. There were also two rectal thermometers, though fortunately both weren’t used at the same time and each was taken out after a few seconds. But ten times worse than that was when they tried to tap Sam like a keg to get a urine sample. This involved, if you must know, a catheter. Again, I learned something new: my daughter has a difficult-to-navigate urethra. I know this because they tried the procedure three times, and by the third time Geralyn and I were holding Sam’s arms and legs down while two nurses tried to do the procedure, one apparently just there to say things like “There, see it? No, not there. There. There. No, down. There.”

Sam, of course, was screaming bloody blue murder the whole time, as I’m sure you or I would have been. After a couple of agonizing minutes Geralyn finally threw in the towel, shouting “Okay, STOP! STOP, STOP!” because none of the Madigans could take it any more. The catheter tapping was not to be.

Yet they still needed urine to determine the cause of the fever, which had at least gone down by this point thanks to “the best way” of administering Tylenol. So Plan B was enacted. Plan B was brilliant in its simplicity, if a bit gross. It involved taping a plastic sack over Sam’s hoo-ha and waiting for her to pee into it. The nurses gave us a diaper with a hole cut in the crotch so we could thread the plastic sack through it and have it dangle between Sam’s legs like the world’s most vulgar fashion accessory.

Normally, getting Sam to pee is far from hard. That’s like one of her core competencies. In fact, there are often times when I can’t stop her from doing it, like when I carry her from the changing table to the bathtub. But sure enough, a watched pot never boils and a watched baby never micturates. We walked around the E.R. waiting room for an hour and a half feeding her Pedialyte (basically baby Gatoraide) and trying to convince her to let it all out so the nice nurses could have their specimen. Not only would she just not go, but she became fascinated by her pee sack and insisted on grabbing at it.

But wait, it gets worse. While we were waiting for Sam to pee on demand, the doctors wanted us to do the second of the two procedures needed to determine the cause of her illness: an X-Ray. So we took Sam and her pee sack into the CHAMBER OF X-RAY HORRORS. While there we –and by “we” I mean I, because these things always seem to fall to me– had to don a lead apron and hog tie my shrieking Sam to a table using little velcro straps that pinned her tiny arms up above her head. I then had to force down her flailing legs while the X-Ray tech lowered this massive, horrifying device from above, lining it up so that it could BLAST ENOUGH RADIATION THROUGH MY BABY DAUGHTER TO BURN AN IMAGE OF HER INNARDS ONTO THE FILM BENEATH HER.

Throughout all of this, Sam was screaming and sputtering, alternately terrified, angry, and hysterical. The whole time she stared me directly in the eyes, wearing a pleading expression as if to say “Help me! That’s your job! Why aren’t you helping me? You’re my daddy!” And I just had to stand there and look at her, scared out of her mind and made helpless by the straps pinning her arms to the table and her own father’s hands restraining her legs. For a split second, I had an absurd image of her as James Bond, tethered to the cold, sterile table while the villain’s death ray slowly descended from above. Only James Bond didn’t typically shriek hysterically until snot streamed out his nose.

In a few seconds it was over, though, and I was clawing at the straps to release Sam’s arms. Geralyn was there in the next instant, holding Sam against her cheek and soothing away her tears. About that time I looked at the plastic bag protruding from Sam’s diaper and noticed that something good had come out of this after all.

The ordeal had literally scared the piss out of her.

Actually, that wasn’t the only good thing. It was, in fact, the X-Ray that told the doctor what’s wrong. Apparently Sam has a small infection in one of her lung. Not pneumonia or anything that scary, just a small bug against which the doctor armed us with antibiotics that we could thankfully administer the “second best way.”

So, Sam’s doing better. Her fever is still there, but it’s nowhere near as high. She’s cranky, but on the plus side she’s sleeping a lot and we raised her daily juice limit to infinity ounces so we can keep her hydrated. She should be over this in a few days, a week at most. Still, this whole thing sucked more than I can tell you and I hope Sam ultimately takes after her dad, who barely ever got sick as a child.

To top it off, here’s this week’s pictures of a non-feverish Samantha: