We had our first stiches this summer. Taylor was at the park and wasn't looking forward while she was running. Unfortunately, there was a pole in front of her. She busted her head right open. Luckily, we were only a few blocks from an emergency room. This wasn't the worst part of the whole ordeal though. After we were at the ER and the doctor gave her 5 shots in her head to numb her up, everybody told her that it wasn't going to hurt anymore. They draped her head and started sewing her up. She was still fighting and screaming and people still had to hold her down, but the doctor couldn't understand why. Then Jimmy figured it out. She wasn't numb! She doesn't go numb just like me and other people on my side of the family. She felt every stich! I felt terrible. Once we figured this out, the doctor said that he only had one more stich and that he was just going to "go for it" and finish the last stich even though she wasn't numb.
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Then, we had to go back to the pediatricians office to get the stiches removed. I told Taylor that it wasn't going to hurt, but after her traumatic experience in the ER, she didn't believe me at all. So the nurse and I had to hold her down while the medical assistant tried to remove her stiches. In the process, Taylor was so scared and was fighting us so bad, and moving so much that the medical assistant ended up stabbing her right in her wound and opening part of it up again. It started bubbling out blood and she ran and got the doctors. I asked if we could glue her re-opened wound and he said no. He said that they could stich it closed again. I quickly asked if there were ANY other options so Taylor got like 10 steri-strips and a new bandaid.

The same day that Taylor got her stiches removed, Carley went to the pediatricians office too. Yes, it was quite the week with doctor's visits. She started vomiting on friday night and vomited all night long and into saturday. Then she started having the worst diarrhea I have EVER seen. She was starting to show signs of dehydration and her skin was this weird yellow color with gray under her eyes. So I strapped a diaper on her and gave her a bag to vomit in as we drove to the doctor's office. She was so dehydrated that they gave her TWO bags of IV fluids and gave her anti-vomitting drugs. They told me not to give her much to drink that night because she already had so much fluids in her body that it could overload her heart.

She didn't vomit anymore, but she continued to have diarrhea, bad, very frequently, all that night and through the next day. She started to become really lethargic and kept falling asleep and having weird dreams. I started to get worried and I took her vital signs again. She was getting dehydrated. Dang! I debated whether I should take her back to the doctors but Jimmy convinced me to do it. So, Sunday night I took her back to the pediatricians. When I got there, they took one look at her and told me to take her straight to Primary Children's hospital. I was like, "are you sure?" so they took her vitals and her heart rate was in the 160's ( it should be between 80-120).

I drove to the ER and they said that she was in shock and in metabolic acidosis (it's when your body isn't getting profused with blood and it can ruin your kidneys and can potentially cause organ failure and death). I kept my cool at this point because I knew that they could probably treat it at this point. They had her hooked up to a christmas tree of IV lines and were running a battery of tests. They were throwing all of these diseases at me that could be causing all of this and I kept thinking, "Please don't let it be that!" Then, after they flooded her with IV fluids and anitbiotics and tests, she started going unresponsive. I couldn't get her to wake up. At that point, the nurse and I were both calling her name, I was patting her cheeks and pulling up her eye lids and she finally groaned "what?" at me. I asked her to open her eyes. She pried them open but her eyes just stared straight ahead and didn't move. At this point, I started to get a little panicked. This was my little baby girl and it started to sink in that she was really sick.

The doctor came in at this point and told me that now she might have spinal meningitis or encephalitis because she wasn't responding to the fluids. I became a little emotional when she said that now she needed to do a spinal tap on her. Jimmy and his dad came to the ER and gave Carley a blessing. Then I watched as they gave her the spinal. I knew that I wouldn't be a problem for me to watch a spinal tap on anyone in general, but I didn't know if it would bother me to watch my own daughter, so I sat down while I watched. It was painful for Carley and I hated that, but I didn't feel faint. At this point, it was like 2:00 am and I had to take the state boards to get my nursing license the next morning. So I left to get a few hours of sleep while Jimmy stayed with her. She spent a night in the intensive care unit and was put on isolation precautions (that's where all the nurses and doctors come in her room fully gowned, gloved, and masked).

She had a terrible time with her IV's and ended up getting poked 7 times. She still has the scars on her hands and arms. She also looked like she had been in a boxing match because her face was swelled up bad from all the fluids they were pumping her with. It was difficult because she was so dehydrated and they couldn't get her diarrhea under control. Finally, she improved and by Tuesday, they told us that she didn't have any life-long-scary-disease that they had suspected and that she had contracted a nasty virus named the "adeno virus" and that she could finally go home. Man, was she happy to go home. She hated her IV's, hated being poked all the time, hated dragging all her monitors and wires into the bathroom everytime she had to go, and hated being in isolation. I was just glad that she won't have any lasting affects from this whole ordeal.