We had a little bit of drama this past Sunday. Everyone’s okay now but it was an interesting ride of a day.
Sunday - 7amEllaiden woke up with her highest degree of fever for the weekend, right up near 106F. She had reached such fever heights before (a couple months ago from a common virus), but with her little sister Soren only days old, we decided to take precautions with lil’ E and have the doctor giver her a look-over.
10amThe family practice our pediatrician belongs to fortunately has weekend hours. There they checked Ellaiden over and concluded her fever most likely was due to a virus. She’d just started play-school last week (darn those strangers’ dirty kids), so that made sense to us. The rest of the day we kept an eye on her and used Motrin and Tylenol to keep her fever at bay.
5:30pmEllaiden woke from her nap crying. Not a surprise really. Her temperature was around 100. Not too bad. While I was holding her in the kitchen, I noticed she seemed to be gritting her teeth. It actually sounded like she had broken all the teeth in her mouth and was gargling them around. I then heard what sounded like congestion in her esophagus. She tried to cough but struggled to clear her throat. I set her on the counter. She threw up clear hot liquid but still struggled with whatever was in her throat and mouth. My mom, who’s in town helping us with newborn Soren, picked her up. Ellaiden started choking. I ran and grabbed a rubber sucker from Soren’s crib and tried to suction her mouth. Didn’t help. Jenny came into the room. What’s going on? she said frantically. She’s not breathing, my mom uttered. Call 911.
I called 911. With my cell phone. They asked me my address. I told them. They asked again. I told them more loudly. Angrily. I wanted to pound my knuckles into the hard brick of our house.
Is she blue? No. Is she conscious? Yes. He told me more instructions. We followed them.
While I was on the phone with 911 my mom laid Ellaiden on the dining room table. She pressed hard twice on her chest. Ellaiden started to cry.
She’s starting to cry, I told the 911 man. Is it her normal cry? I guess so. Are you sure it’s her normal cry? Yeah, it’s her normal cry. Is she breathing? Yes. Is she responsive? Yeah, she seems okay now.
I got off the phone with the 911 man and a fire truck pulled up in front of our house. Four or five firemen rushed into the house, carrying various types of life-saving gear. Hmm, Ellaiden said curiously, casually. As in, hmm, who are these strange blue-shirted men in my house?
As everyone was getting a grip on the situation, one of the fireman said, uh there’s a baby crying in that room. He pointed to our bedroom, where Soren was. I thought Jenny was in there, Jenny thought my mom was in there, and my mom was out front telling our neighbors everything was okay. Soren felt left out obviously.
Two EMS guys, both with long Elvis-like sideburns, came into the kitchen. One EMS Elvis had red tattoos snaking down each arm. Such is Austin, TX.
The firemen left. The EMS Elvis’s remained and checked her over thoroughly and concluded she was fine. Lungs were clear. Breathing was normal. Pulse was strong. No fever. Did we want them to take her to Dell Children’s hospital? No, we agreed. A fluke thing this choking was. Crazy. Scary. But random. You guys can leave. They left.
Ellaiden spent the next hour somewhat lethargically playing around the house. We watched her closely.
6:30pmJenny and I were on the floor in the den. Ellaiden walked up to the Jenny and starting her teeth grinding again. She threw up a smaller amount of the clear hot saliva.
Okay, we’re going to the hospital, Jenny said. We went.
6:40pmAfter the football was over, one of the ER attendants said to his co-worker. That’s when they all came in.
They being the thirty people who were already crammed into the ER waiting room. A brand new, nationally-renowned children’s hospital. State of the art facilities. And they built their one ER waiting room the size of a two-car garage. Chalk full of germs, germs, and more germs for us to carry back home to our newborn.
Jenny curled up ball-like in a chair and I walked around holding Ellaiden. We forgot to bring her shoes. No walking on the the floor. The germs. Think of the germs. Ellaiden is fine at this point, except that she’s hungry, it’s about her bedtime, and I won’t let her walk around because we forgot her shoes.
Oh look, Ellaiden. A fish tank. Oh look, Ellaiden. A baby throwing up on her sister and the sister saying, ah man and the throw up forming cloudy little pools on the tile floor. We walked out of the waiting room to wait in the ER entrance area.
7:45pmWe were called into our own little room. Ellaiden was given a blue hospital gown with dozens of astronauts floating around its cotton-textured atmosphere. Of course the astronaut gown was too big for her, so I tried to cinch it up, rig it to fit her small frame. We then let Ellaiden loose, shoeless as she was, to explore our little ER room.
A doctor came to see us sooner than we expected. We told him the story of our day thus far. I’m not concerned at all with the choking, he said. I’ve never heard of a child choking to death on her own fluids, be it saliva or vomit of whatever. If someone was there who was medically trained, they would not have been as worried as you were. You were right to call and to bring her in, but it wasn’t as serious as it seemed. What I’m concerned about is the high fever.
We didn’t come to wait in your two-car garage ER waiting room to figure out why she had a high fever. We came for the choking. But that’s good to hear about the choking, that it wasn’t that big of a deal. And that she really didn’t stop breathing, as in turning blue, loss of oxygen to the body, etc. Still, scary as hell.
So we’re going to get some blood from her and some urine. The truth is in the urine, the doctor said as he was walking out. Oh and the test results should come back in a couple of hours.
Was he kidding? I don’t think so. A couple of hours? Wow, we’re going to be here a while.
And the truth is in the urine? Is that some type of Hippocratic proverb?
8:30pmFirst came the catheter. No parent should have to hold down their daughter while she’s having a catheter stuck inside her. Ellaiden had gone through this once before (another round of virus-induced high fevers) and she screamed just as loudly, cried just as pitifully.
Then the needle and the blood and the IV, which they taped to her arm in case they had to get more blood or put medicine into her later.
With Ellaiden growing more disconsolate from lack of food and need of sleep (she was fever- and choke-free by this point), our friend Noelle arrived with sustinance and pumping gear. Food, water, shoes for Ellaiden. And the breast pump for Jenny, who had missed her feeding with Soren and was swelling with milk and pain.
Ellaiden slammed down some water and most of the insides of a turkey & cheese sandwich. Jenny pumped. Back at home, around the same time, Soren dutifully drank three ounces of previously-pumped breast milk for her first bottle feeding. Mother and daughters rejoiced.
While holding two sandwich bags in her hands, Ellaiden would waive to the nurses and doctors passing by our door. She made a friend across the hall from us. He jumped up and down and made faces at her. She stared back at him smiling, her arms limp at her sides, her hands clutching the sandwich bags.
So the time passed. Jenny sitting in a chair, still uncomfortable and in pain from giving birth to her second child five days earlier. I astride the stool on wheels, corralling Ellaiden to and fro as she ransacked the room, a little blue wizard in an astronaut gown making the most of her first ER visit, leaving bits of turkey and cheese strewn about the floor.
11:30pmThe nurse came in and said the tests were negative and that it’s probably a virus. Hmm, imagine that. She took the IV out of Ellaiden’s arm, gave us our discharge papers. We paid the $100 co-pay and drove home.
11:50pmUpon preparing the household for slumber, after Jenny and I each took ER-rinsing showers, we discovered the baby monitor wasn’t working. Perfect night for the monitor to go on the fritz. Really, just a brilliant cap to the day. So I bedded down on a few comforters in Ellaiden’s room, next to her crib, and camped out there for the night. And so the day ended.
