Admitted

I thought things were improving...until 9:30 last night when Aaron had another coughing/vomiting fit and spent the entire night sandwiched between Adam and I in the big bed. I couldn't sleep...so I lay awake listening to the whistling in his chest.

At 3:30 Aaron was still in his pjs as we strolled into Dr. Kramarczuk's office for our check-up. He refused food all day and had basically stopped drinking fluids. His pulse ox had dropped to 85% and while we were sitting in the office, he developed diarrhea. In spite of all this, he was still playing, laughing...and racing me down the hall on return trips from the bathroom. After reading Mickey Mouse's The Prince and the Pauper for the second time in 2 days, he looked up at me from his chair and said, "Mama, I don't know about this place." Aaron's lack of clinical symptoms seemed to make Dr. Kramarczuk even more nervous, because he feared that as soon as Aaron started acting sick, he would be seriously ill and very difficult to treat. He strongly recommended that we go immediately to Methodist Hospital for IV antibiotics and re-hydration.

While we were waiting around for all the fun to begin Aaron looked up at me and asked, "Mama, what are we doing here?" Since 20 weeks of gestation, Aaron has been challenging our assumptions about standard clinical practice. This is no exception. A part of me thinks maybe we would eventually get over this illness at home...but the little voice in the back of my head challenges, "can you live with yourself if he doesn't?"

So...as my brave, brave knight, Aaron sleeps peacefully in his hospital bed snuggling with his bear, I pray that we made the right decision. He's survived a botched attempt at a lab draw following successful IV insertion, a MRSA swab, a influenza swab (which caused him to vomit up all of the orange juice I had painstakingly coaxed into him), a bag of IV antibiotics, and a 10:00pm nebulizer order (who orders a 10:00 pm anything on a peds floor?)

He finally fell asleep at 9:45 as I was pumping milk for Nolan. I'm reminded again that people don't go to hospitals to get rest. Now I'm going to shut down my computer and snuggle in next to him...right where I belong.