just ugh.
its too much to probably catch up on in one post – but basically little miss thang is pulling out all the stops in an effort to drive me insane. i mean, i am sure that’s not her end goal, but it is a nice side effect.
In as much of a nutshell as i can describe it – she has been fighting a cold or some kind of viral URI (upper respiratory infection) for a few weeks now. She and Kaylen have essentially had the same cold/bug for at least two weeks, and have pretty much tracked each other step by step through the course of it – getting the hacky cough at the same time, starting the green snot at the same time, being super tired at the same time, etc. But this past Sunday morning, Kaylen woke up slightly improved, and kendall was definitely showing signs of going the other direction.
My apologies to those of you who find this to be TMI (too much info) but if I don’t put it down here, i won’t have any recollection of what happened when for future reference!
So she started the morning with some very disgusting stinky dark pee, and i thought, great, she’s got a UTI. Went to vent her after cleaning her up and her gastric contents smelled like rotten eggs – yes it was as disgusting as it sounds. She proceeded to have lots of watery diarrhea with mucus all throughout Sunday, and decided to throw a nice little fever in there (only 101 – but in a kid who hangs out at 97 and never gets above 99, it definitely raised red flags). I was pretty sure we would end up in the ER at some point that day, and it wouldn’t be pretty considering we only had Ben’s car which means not enough legal seats for everyone. On top of that it was snowing and Ben’s car is not meant for snowy driving. But we managed to make it through that nite with a farrell bag to vent her and some extra fluids bolused in.
Monday morning she woke up quite a bit improved over her going to bed on Sunday demeanor and I thought maybe sunday may have been just a random fluke. She slept and crabbed her way through the day though, and it was apparent she was still fighting something, on top of the fact that she started back up with the diarrhea after waking up from her late afternoon nap. The more concerning thing was her complete lack of pee that entire day, and then the amount of diarrhea she continued to produce later monday nite into early tuesday morning. Throughout our late nite together, she decided to drop her core temp down to 96, and her sugars were 142 (fasting) – so clearly her body was under some kind of stress. Add to this that she was FLIPPING out if i tried to go anywhere near her belly or chest, and in general she was just a hot psychotic mess. It was disturbing to see her like that, since it was about a hundred eighty degrees opposite of what we normally get from her. I was feeling like maybe if i pulled my hair out by the roots it would be less painful/stressful than trying to figure out if i needed to take her in to the ER. Eventually though the diarrhea seemed to slow down, her breathing came back down to normal (had been pretty fast with a very strong fast heartbeat), and I felt like we could at least hold steady for the next 5-6 hours till the peds office opened.
Tuesday morning she woke up with some more diarrhea, and a little more pee than the day before, and a little more glisten in her eyes, and no more crabfest – but I thought I should call and at least talk about all this stuff with Dr. Natalie. Well of course they said to come right in, so off we trekked. Luckily my parents had taken the big girls on an overnite adventure to St. Louis to see two of my brothers, so it was just me and babies. When we get there, of course kendall is wanting to smile and play, has a nice 99 degree temporal temp, and has made some more pee. She had started retching (trying to puke) within about five minutes of getting to the office, so at least i still felt like i had made the right call by taking her in. We started culturing every body fluid we could obtain and running some bloodwork tests to try to figure out a.) if there is an infection somewhere and b.) how her body is responding to all the craziness. Two hours later we were able to ascertain that at least she does not appear to have a UTI, and that while her electrolytes are trending towards the wacky side, she seems to be doing a pretty good job of holding her own. It’s clearly taking its toll on her, so we’re all ready to jump in with Plan B if she gives us a sign that she isn’t able to do it on her own anymore, but for now we’ll continue supporting her at home.
Meaning basically that its a fine tightrope right now of keeping her fluid balanced – not too much (because then it will tip her electrolytes the wrong way) and not too little (because then she will dehydrate and have a whole other set of problems to deal with). Food (whether it be her few crackers, ounce of yogurt, or handful of cheerios that she can eat or her 40 oz of formula we’re supposed to cram into her in any given 24 hr period) seems to be triggering the diarrhea because her gut has stopped trying to absorb food/fluid and instead is just shoveling everything through as if it were a straight chute. Clearly diarrhea is a nice one-way ticket to dehydration if its not kept in check. So we are trying to keep her body hydrated and electrolyted by running diluted formula and pedialyte with an extra shot of sugar water every few hours, with no food for a while (we’ll try again with food on wednesday morning). See if we can’t give her stomach a little bit of a rest to try to recover some energy so it can pick back up again and muscle through the rest of this virus.
I hope we are on the tail end of this. I hope this is just her body’s last final push towards the finish line of this cold/whatever it is. I hope nothing ooey-gooey is growing in her tummy. i hope she can continue to do so well at fighting so hard to maintain metabolic balance in spite of her body’s penchant for imbalance!
I guess we’ll see what tomorrow brings!
thanks for checking in on us!
terra
because you just have to know...