HOSPITAL RECOVERY

We're recovering from quite a week. We had to return to the emergency room on Tuesday night (after the 2 trips Monday night/Tuesday morning) because Aubrey's body wasn't responding to the antibiotics and fever reducer for her kidney infection. All the sudden at 9pm on Tuesday night (at home), she was having additional symptoms like vomiting and uncontrollable, high fevers. I got her to the ER at 10 pm.

She and I spent the night in the ER -- I think we slept on the little bed from 1:30 am to 5:30 am -- where they worked on her fever. She vomited again that morning, and still had a high fever around 102/103 degrees and then we were moved to the Pediatric floor. The doctors were concerned about her worsened symptoms, and still didn't like the fact that she had continued pain in her right side. They still suspected appendicitis. The thought that these two things, kidney infection and appendicitis, might be occurring in her body seemed unlikely, but then seemed particularly awful if that's indeed what was happening.

So we stayed two more nights. A second ultrasound revealed fluid around the appendix but nothing too suspicious otherwise. The surgeon came and examined Aubrey, but Aubs wasn't in pain then when her right side was pressed, and the surgeon said it would've been more obvious. She also said that high of a fever wasn't characteristic of appendicitis.

With that, Aubrey seemed to be doing better, but they wanted to continue to observe her. When the pediatric doctor returned the next morning (yesterday) and checked her side, Aubrey still spoke of pain in that area. The doctors didn't want to dismiss what Aubrey was saying and decided to go for 90% accuracy with a CT scan.

The CT scan (taken yesterday evening) was negative and it looks like Aubrey's symptoms were the result of a gnarly kidney infection, particularly in her right kidney (hence the pain there and the appendix concern).

It was a challenging (often sleepless) time. (Let's see, with the IV bag flushing her system 24/7, I woke up in pee next to Aubrey 2x the first night and 3x the second. Let me just say, there's nothing quite like waking up in someone else's warm, wet pee. I TOLD the nurses she was a really hard sleeper, and I was HOPING to be, so if they could please "pee" her throughout the night, I would greatly appreciate it. I could do that since Aubs was the only patient on the floor, and they were happy to oblige anyway. But, apparently checking her every 4 hours wasn't enough. I should've asked them to check every 2...)

That said, the time there wasn't as bad or scary or awful as it could have been. Not only did Aubrey get to watch more TV than she's ever imagined watching, read new books, and get uninterrupted one-on-one time with Mom, but I felt like we were constantly in good hands, with experts determined to get to the bottom of things, listening to what a little girl said and leaving no stone unturned. That made it a lot easier to be strong about all the uncertainty and precarious health situations.

Now, Aubrey's home, perky, and playing like crazy with her brother, so that helps everything feel OK, too.

Speaking of brother, he REALLY missed Aubrey. He said a number of sad, sweet things about her absence and LOVED visting her each evening when he came in with Mick and Jan.

Fortunately, Jan was down here visiting so she took care of Dane in the mornings and after school. It doesn't get much more convenient or comfortable than that. It made it nice, too, that Mick got to keep his school schedule, since the new quarter started Monday.