Resuscitating My Baby Part 2: An Update

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

As many of you know, we recently had a traumatic event with our soon-to-be two year old toddler, Ella. Because of all the emails, texts, and calls, I just wanted to take a moment to update everyone.

After (what will now be dubbed forever as) THE EVENT, we made it home from the emergency room around 1 a.m. on Friday, January 15. Ella had no more seizure episodes and her fever was lower.

Friday, as well as Saturday, she was O.K. Not well, but as O.K. as a sick little baby could act.

Sunday her fever started to spike again. Late afternoon, she started to become extremely lethargic, as she was before her seizure on Thursday. Not taking any chances, we loaded up and headed back to the E.R. (our pediatrician is on vaca for 10 days and it was a holiday weekend, anyway).

Turns out? Ella has RSV, or Respiratory Syncytial Virus. You may (or may not) know, but RSV is an extremely contagious virus that can be potentially life-threatening to infants and toddlers. You can read more about it at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but I won't bore you here.

In a nutshell, we were transferred to another hospital (yep, that's two ambulance rides and two hospitals in three days for those of you keeping score) where they kept Ella overnight. Her fever stayed very high until Monday morning. After that, she started to run around the room and play and eat. We were were released late afternoon.

She still has a cough, but no more fever, and thankfully, no more seizures.

She feels much, much better than her parents, who are now both sick from her germiness.

Thank you, everyone, for your concern, thoughts and prayers. It was so overwhelmingly supportive that I'll be writing a blog post about it when I can wrap my thoughts around the enormity of it.

By the way, do you know how long it takes to feel like you've showered all the germs off of two ambulance rides and two hospitals?!?