Our Brave Little Sick Girl

It all started on June 25th. We were enjoying a visit from my family in Florida, and we were spending the day in Old Town. Madeline was in a great mood and I even snapped this picture, which is one of my favorites:

But by the middle of the afternoon, she was getting super cranky. By late afternoon she was running a fever. Sunday morning we got up with her around 6:30 and she was burning up with a temp of over 104. We spoke with the on-call pediatrician, and they advised we take her in to urgent care. We were there before the doors opened, our arms wrapped tightly around our miserable girl.

The physician there was great with her. When he thumped around on her back, he heard something he didn't like in the lower left section of her lungs. And then with one word all the strength I'd pulled together was eroding away - pneumonia. Obviously he didn't know my family history with respiratory disease. I sat there trying to keep it together, the tears welling up inside me. Finally they began to spill out like a scene from "Alice in Wonderland." Brian explained that I had lost my sister to respiratory disease not quite two years ago. And as I sat there weeping silently, my beautiful little girl in my arms, the doctor did something I never expected. He wheeled his stool over and hugged us and cried with us. 

As we walked over to radiology for her to have x-rays, he handed me a tissue and said that he figured if he needed one I probably did too. After reading her x-rays he did say that he believed it was a low-level case of pneumonia and that a few days on antibiotics would do the trick.

Over the next week, she had good days and bad days. You could just look in her eyes and see that she felt miserable.

Eventually about six days later she was feeling better. We celebrated July 4th and she went back to daycare. The last Thursday (the 7th) we got the call from daycare that she had a fever that was too high to be related to teething. Brian took her to the doctor and they said it was an ear infection, so she needed to go back on antibiotics. Some days were better than others, and we have tried to do whatever we can to help her feel better. Case in point - the fudgesicle night. I had run up last Thursday to get her new antiobiotics, and this is what I came home to.

It's been a long five and a half days. Almost every night she's spiked fevers around 103 or 104 degrees. We took her back yesterday, and her pediatrician decided to run some blood tests to see if they could figure out what's going on. They had to take the blood from her arm. I warned the check-in girl that they needed to assign someone that was good because they were only going to get one shot. 

I felt so weak. I couldn't go in with her. I just couldn't go in and see her go through that. But I heard her scream from down the hall and behind two doors. Shortly after, she seemed to be fine, though.

The tests came back negative for mono, strep and pneumonia. They are perplexed by what it is because of what it isn't. So now we're sitting here hoping and praying, playing the waiting game to see if the new antibiotics kick this thing's butt. Through it all she has been such a trooper. She has been so strong and we're so amazed by her. No matter how sick she gets, she still finds a way to do something to make us smile and laugh. 

So that's where stand for now. Sorry for the long-winded post, but I wanted to capture this journey from the beginning. I sure hope I'm posting an "it's all behind us" post very soon.