What a terrible last few days. Thank you everyone for the thoughts and prayers, it really helps to know you have people pulling for you.
Our 16 month old boy, Finn, has been kind of off and on fighting a stomach bug for over a week with really runny diapers and being fussy and clingy, not his usual happy, playful self. Well Sunday we were going to go around to the Miami County farm days, where you can visit local farms and see how they run and get to pet some of the animals, kids and my wife love it, I grew up working on my grandparents farm so it's not that exciting for me but it wasn't for me. Finn was really sluggish waking up and not interested in eating or drinking much, which also is really unusual for him, all he wanted was to be held but he was fussing and felt really hot. Turned out he had a 99.6* fever, but my wife was convinced it was a tooth coming in causing it so we went anyways. By the time we got to the second farm he was sweaty and really lethargic, he looked exhausted but kept fussing and not falling asleep like we thought he might to sleep off whatever was bugging him. When I picked him up I could feel his heart beating really fast and he was breathing funny. I told my wife we needed to take him to urgent care and she didn't want to at first but I kept bugging her about it so we took off on the 30 minute drive into town to urgent care. By the time we almost there, Finn was sort of crying but taking really fast, shallow breaths and choking up. I jumped into the back seat and pulled him out of his car seat to pat him on his back and his eyes were rolling around and he was really pale and drenched in sweat.
We got to the urgent care for Children's Mercy and I handed Finn to my wife to run him inside while I gathered Lake and anything else we needed out of the car and ran inside too. They were already in the back with Finn, so Lake and I stayed in the waiting room, trying to keep Lake out of the room from seeing his baby brother like that. My wife texted me that they were in room 8 and he was getting put on an IV and having blood drawn and I needed to come back. It was rough seeing his tiny little body on the table with all the doctors and nurses around him.
I've been in the hospital lots of times for work with people who had OD'd or were shot/stabbed and not doing good, there's always lots of staff in the room, it's never a good sign when there's lots of staff in the room. My wife broke down as soon as we got there so I told her to take Lake and get out of there so she could calm down. They had a hard time finding a good vein and the first stick didn't take and the second one was in his wrist, which was a less than ideal spot but it worked at that moment. Having to hold your child down when you know they're scared and in pain and want nothing more than for you to hold them is heart wrenching. Once they had the blood drawn and the IV going he was wrapped up tight so he couldn't pull the IV, it really sank in that it could be anything and that's when it got me real bad.
The doctors and nurses kept funneling in, we did several test, Xray, blood, stool, sonogram. At the urgent care, the doctor suspected it was something I can't pronounce that is basically when the intestines telescope in on themselves, which tends to happen at the same time a person has a stomach virus. That's when we were transported to Children's Mercy hospital in downtown KCMO for more test, which eventually determined that it appeared to at least be nothing gravely serious. From the best the doctors could tell, he had gotten a bad stomach virus, which caused him to have the bad runny diapers, and also gotten a secondary viral infection that looked like a rash but was also on his tongue and throat that made swallowing painful, so he wasn't drinking or eating well, which caused him to get severely dehydrated very quickly.
We got released Tuesday around noon and picked Lake up from his grandma's and had to stop to get some formula really quick so my wife just dropped me at the front of the store to run in and grab some. While I was inside he said his throat hurt. We had him open his mouth and saw this;
Good thing is, we we're that far from their regular doctor's office and it was still walk in hours, so Lake and my wife ran inside real fast while Finn, Cassidee, and I sat in the car watched Daniel Tiger and ate Goldfish. Thankfully they got them in really fast and did a rapid strep test that was negative, he just had a viral infection of his own. We finally got home around 4PM, the wife and I a frazzled mess, neither one of the boys feeling great but neither was bad enough to be in the hospital so that was an improvement. After they got their baths and relaxed a bit, I gave Finn his bottle and put him in his swing, I'm not sure if it went back and forth 10 times before he was asleep. He didn't sleep maybe 6 hours the almost 3 days we were in the hospital. It was just after 8PM when he crashed, and other than a couple times he whined a little that I gave him bottles, Tylenol, and changed his diaper in the middle of the night and had him back asleep in less than 10 minutes each time, he didn't wake up again until after 10AM yesterday morning. He spent the whole day running around the house laughing and playing like nothing every happened, it really was great to see him back to his old self so fast. Lake's throat was still red but he said it didn't hurt as bad so hopefully he'll be better in a day or two.
Sorry that was long winded, but there's brief run down of what happened.