Ethan's First Visit to the Hospital

And hopefully his last. Last Sunday we were at my aunt's house for dinner and she mentioned that Ethan felt warm. When we got home, we got Morgan ready for bed and put her down, then I fed and changed Ethan. I felt his head, and he felt warm so I took his temp just as a precaution. It popped up that his temp was 102! I told Dustin and he said to take it again, and sure enough still 102. We grabbed the book the pediatrician gave to us when Morgan was born that tells you what to do for different illnesses. It said to call right away for a fever in a baby under four months. I call the on-call doctor and he told me that I had to go straight to the ER because Ethan is only 6 weeks. He said to go to Cardon's Children Medical Center, and that we will be there about 4 hrs because of the different tests they were going to do. Needless to say I was very worried about my little guy.

The plan was that I was just going to take Ethan and Dustin would stay home with Morgan because we did not want to wake her up at 10:00 at night to run around the hospital. Dustin called our friend Rusty and asked him to come over to help give Ethan a blessing. When he came over he offered for him and Carianne to take Morgan for us so that Dustin could come with me. I am so grateful that they did take Morgan because I really didn't want to go by myself. Thank you guys so much!!!

Get to the ER, checked in and brought back to a room. When the nurse to Ethan's temp it was 101.6, so she gave him tylenol and started prepping him for his spinal tap. Here he is hanging out on the cold bed waiting for them to come take a urine sample, blood sample, and spinal fluid. This will be the last time you see him with a binkie. He absolutely hates them unless you put "sugar water" on it.


The nurse who took the blood sample told us that it is difficult to get needles into baby's hands because the veins are so short, so you have to make sure to start back far enough so you don't run out of vein. Well, he ran out of vein on both of Ethan's wrists. So then the nurse there helping hold Ethan and giving him the "sugar water" and binkie had to do the needle. She looked for a very long time at his veins to make sure he only had to do one more poke. While we waited for the doctor to come in for the spinal tap, the nurse informed us that it takes 48 hours to get the test results back and that they won't release Ethan until the results are back because they want to get them on antibiotics so that if the results come back that it is bacterial that was causing the fever he has already been on antibiotics for two days. At this time it was 1 am Monday, so what we thought would be a 4 hr visit just turned into a 48 hr visit.

It was 4 am by the time we got up to our hotel room and went through everything we needed to with the nurse. Here is our sweet baby in his hospital bed. Such a big bed for our little guy.

I of course stayed at the hospital with Ethan and Dustin's parents were so nice and took Morgan for us, so that Dustin could go to work and then come to the hospital. Dustin singing to Ethan trying to help him sleep.

Tuesday morning when the doctor came in he mentioned that all the test results still showed negative for bacteria, but that Ethan's white blood cell count was high which indicates viral meningitis. Which is better than bacterial. Because of that he wanted us to stay through Thurs just to be safe no bacteria shows up. I really didn't want to stay another day, but I would rather stay another day than come home to have to go straight back to the hospital.

Early Wednesday morning Ethan was running a 100.4 temp, so the nurse gave him some tylenol. When the doctor came in he wasn't concerned and said that we could still go home Thursday as long as things were still looking good tomorrow morning. Of course Ethan had to start running a 101.3 temp around 12:30 that afternoon, so I was nervous that we would have to stay through Friday, but Thursday morning the doctor said we could go because he didn't run a fever through the night. As you can tell, Ethan was ecstatic that we were able to go home.


He is doing really well and a very happy boy. Except for when he gets tired. We are still having issues with him staying asleep, but hopefully he will grow out of that.