Saturday, February 3, 2007

And then it got ugly ...

Perry settled just fine last night, but woke at midnight with shivers and woke again at 1:30 in a pool of vomit. He kept puking all night long and into the morning. We stayed up with him watching children's PBS programs (having 24 hour Sprout and KQED Kids on the rare occasions when Perry is sick makes our digital cable bill worth every penny). Perry only slept about an hour in 15 minute snatches, and Jay and I took turns out on the couch. But since it took two of us to deal with the barfing, neither one of us got more than 45 minutes of sleep at a time. In the morning I had an errand to run,, and I called up our hostess to let her know that one of the kids who had been at her party was now sick, and the other parents might want to know. She is in training to become an EMT, so she knew that nausea and vomiting after a blow to the head are a danger sign, and asked me to call a doctor.

The advice nurse at the urgent care heard the situation and told us that we needed to immediately go to an emergency room.

So, off we bundled to El Camino Hospital. They're the place to go if you don't need complex care, and the other times we'd been there Perry didn't have to wait long for medical care. Today, though, even though it was early afternoon on a Saturday, was a total zoo. We waited only 15 minutes before Perry was seen by a PA, but it was another 4 hours before he could get the CT scan the doctors wanted. Ambulance after ambulance kept rolling in with sick ("sick like dead or dying", said one nurse) babies and toddlers, and there was more than one old person who had fallen and banged their heads. Perry was relatively low priority for the scan.

After his scan we waited another hour and a half to get the results. It's frustrating to realize that if it were bad news they'd tell us quickly, but to have to wait forever to be told essentially "You're fine, go home". Eventually a nurse came in and told us "you're fine, go home. Oh, and here is a scrip for anti-nausea medication. Come back if he doesn't get better in a day or so." The scan came back normal, whatever that means. The discharge papers had a diagnosis of concussion, but they think the vomiting was likely because of a coincidental stomach virus. In any case, we did the right thing to take him in, and we're happy there's no swelling or bruising of the brain.

Perry had a little banana and a lot of apple juice and has kept it all down. Hopefully he'll wake up hungry in the morning.

No comments:

About Me

My photo
Mountain View, California
This is Perry's blog. Since he can't type yet, and people (actually, mainly his relatives) want to know what's going on with him, I have started this blog as a spin-off from my own. He can take it over later if he wants to, but I'm sure by the time he's old enough to publish his own thoughts, he'll probably upload them directly from his cortical implant or something.