Testing The Ol' Anti-Depressants

Okay. I finally have some time that I can write down what happened that tested how my anti-depressants/anti-anxiety meds were working.

Basically, between July 13 and August 7, we were spending more time at the hospital than any other year combined.

In mid-July, M was diagnosed with a UTI. We had to go back to the emergency room for IV antibiotics until they could determine what strain of bacteria was giving the UTI - later found out it was e.coli - before giving us oral medication. On the third day- July 15 - M's fontanelle puffed up pretty badly, so we did a head ultrasound that showed a bit of swelling but nothing that the doctors were super concerned about, so they sent us home with a script for oral antibiotics for the UTI and we thought we'd be in the clear.

Wrong. So wrong.

July 26, M is fussy and has smelly urine like he did before the intial UTI. As he had just come off of the antibiotics on the previous Wednesday, I wasn't going to fuck around with whether or not I should take him in. So we get to the ER around 8ish, and sure enough he's got another UTI. So he's given a dose of IV antibiotics and we're told to come back again the next day for the next dose around 4pm (as we were being discharged at midnight). We get home, and he's still struggling and fussing. I give him Tylenol and he starts shivering, and his fever has skyrocketed. He won't eat, and he hasn't had a pee diaper. So I get our shit together and head back to the hospital. There was no pediatric emergency doctor on at that time (roughly 3am), so the adult emergency doctor came in and basically said that they'd be keeping him comfortable and giving him some fluids as he wasn't eating. We crashed for a bit, until about 730am when the staff shift change happened and the doctors and nurses for the day started coming on.

The pediatric emergency doctor, Dr. Siemens, took one look at the chart, one look at M, and said that we'd for sure be spending a couple days at the hospital as he didn't want to mess around with this. M's fontanelle had puffed up again, and everyone could tell that he was just miserable. Not to mention his fever wasn't going away with Tylenol, and Advil decreased it very minutely. At this point, I had gotten maybe an hour of sleep overnight so I called T and explained the situation, and asked if he could come sit with M so I could go home and crash out. He got O to a friend's house to be looked after, and came just in time for the CT scan to be done. Once that was complete, I went home and just zonked out for a couple hours.

Once I got back to the hospital, we were admitted into the Acute Care Pediatric wing - as in the isolation wing. The CT scan showed them that M had bacterial meningitis, caused by the e.coli UTI. It's believed that M had built up a tolerance to the first antibiotic and that the UTI was just kind of kept at bay by it, rather than being killed off completely.

We were in the hospital for 12 days.

T and I switched shifts during this time, he did the days and I did the nights. Thinking back, we probably should have switched off seeing as all of the tests were done during the day and I would be the one to take M to all of his follow-up appointments after, but hindsight is 20/20. During the 12 day adventure, M had an MRI which found a clot in his brain. He also had a renal ultrasound that showed that his kidneys were just barely enlarged, but any enlargement was not good. The last test that was done was a VGUC, which basically tests the path of the urine. Normally, it goes kidneys, bladder, ureter, out. M's is backing up into his kidneys, badly enough that on a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 being minor, his is a 5. So my precious little man is on antibiotics (to keep the UTI's at bay) for the next 18 - 24 months, until he's big enough to get corrective surgery.

So when we were discharged on August 7, we were still on IV antibiotics for the meningitis (which we were taught to administer at home 3 times a day for 10 days), oral antibiotics for the UTI (twice a day for 3 days, then once a day until surgery happens), blood thinner injections for the clot (twice a day), and then vitamin D and BioGaia (for his poor tummy with the antibiotics). Today, this afternoon, was the last dose of the IV antibiotics. And we're sooooooooooo happy about that. We're keeping up the blood thinners until he has a follow-up MRI to determine what's going on with the clot. Hopefully it's been absorbed and the blood thinners can stop.

What did this experience teach us?
1. That our marriage is strong as fuck.
Sickness in a relationship is tough, but sickness of a kid is just the absolute worst. Through all of this, we stuck by each other and did what we could to make things a little easier. We made notes for what had happened during the day/night, gave updates to one another when we would switch off. We made sure to just be kind to one another even if we really weren't feeling that way, because it was just a given that the other person was feeling just as shitty as we were about this whole situation. It's like there was a whole new level of understanding and growth that we reached during this, and where the situation was a terrible one that I never ever want to repeat, it helped us grow closer as a couple and stronger as a parental unit.
We were concerned about money, too, because there was no way that we could be there for Miss O and be there for M if T was working all day. I would have basically had to live at the hospital by myself, which... I don't even want to think about it. One of my girlfriends set up a GoFundMe on our behalf to raise money for us so that T could be at the hospital too. It raised more money than we could even believe, and we are still incredibly grateful for it. We also had a lot of help from our parents and friends, watching Miss O for us.
2. Kids are resilient.
 Miss O knew that something was not 100% good with M, but she was full of love and kisses for him when we had her come to the hospital to see him. M is also back to his smiley self, full of laughs and kicks and noises. Miss O's resilience showed when she was spending a week with my parents, then back with us for switching shifts, then back at daycare or at a friends house, then back to my parents... she was carted all over and handled it amazingly well.
3. Our family doctor is amazing.
There's always a lag in information getting from the hospital to the family doctor. The reason behind this being that they don't send any notes to the family doctor until the patient is discharged from the hospital. However, the doctor is cc'd on any tests that are done... so imagine the confusion of our doctor receiving ultrasound, CT, MRI, bloodwork, and VCUG results on a 3 month old patient of his without any context whatsoever. We played phone tag for a bit and we finally got in touch with one another about 4 days before we were discharged. I explained the situation to him, and he was so incredibly blown away by the course of illness. After seeing him for a follow-up appointment this past week, he mentioned that he discussed it with some of his colleagues around the office and they couldn't believe what had happened either. He had also dropped an "Oh shit" when we were chatting on the phone, and that just made me laugh because despite the fact that he's only a couple years older than me, he's always very proper with his bedside manner.
4. These anti-anxiety/anti-depressants are doing their motherfucking job, and doing it WELL. 
At some point during our first day as an admitted patient, they were giving M oral painkillers to bring the fever down. M refuses to take any medicine orally, which Miss O did the same thing at this age. Not to mention they use the flavoured shit, which of course is going to be weird as fuck to an infant who has only ever had formula (or breastmilk). So he would spit it all out and we never knew how much he got. So we had administered a failure dose of Tylenol, and he was being super fussy so we asked about Advil. They said you bet, gave us the syringe and peaced out. Mom and I were trying to get him to take it but he kept spitting it out, and then he ended up choking on it. So we ring the buzzer for the nurses because buddy is choking and vomiting up all of the formula he had consumed that day and is having issues breathing... the nurses weren't coming so mom and I were yelling for help and we get like 3 nurses and 2 doctors rushing in. Of course, because we're in isolation, they're rushing to put on gloves and masks and the cape-coat thingie (okay, for the life of me I cannot remember the actual word for it). M is fine, but Mom was traumatized by the situation. I kept my cool because honestly and truly, my mentality during this entire ordeal was "How will it help anyone if I'm bawling my eyes out and a basketcase?". The rational part of my brain that had disappeared while pregnant was back, and my mom said that I was a lot stronger than her in this situation. My doctor said the same thing when we saw him last week, that I was holding it together a lot better than even he would be, given the circumstances. I then jokingly said that we upped the dose of the Zoloft at the right time and he kind of just smiled at me.

We are so incredibly grateful for all of the friends and family that helped us during this horrible time. We have several friends who work in the medical field - most of which at the hospital that we were staying at - and it was a huge relief to be able to bounce the technical jargon off of them for a better understanding of what was going on. It was also nice to have a familiar face around when all was tough.

The worst part of this experience, aside from the fact that our son was sick, was the condition of the hospital room. Dated and falling apart, humid as all get-out, and I got to sleep on a mattress on the floor for 12 days. This old body just can't handle that any more.