Bad Virus, part 2

Read part 1 here to get up to speed!

Sunday was quite a bit more work to keep Jameson entertained than Saturday. He awoke pretty cheerful, but wasn’t too thrilled about being tethered. They took him off the IV and oxygen, but both were still attached to him. We tucked the oxygen tubing in his pants to keep him from tripping over yet another cord. And he still was attached to the pulse meter on his toe.

Brian has pretty much endless patience, which is a wonderful compliment to my less-than-patient self. I’m sure he kept me calmer than I would’ve been otherwise, waiting to hear when Jameson’s nose was going to get swabbed for viruses.

There were definitely a couple times when Jameson was near inconsolable, and it was all we could do to try and bounce him in our arms (when he wasn’t trying to fling himself out of them). TV still doesn’t work on him, which I suppose is a good thing, though it certainly didn’t feel like it.

We found out later that day that Jameson was free of any of the known viruses like croup and RSV, so that was a relief.

The diagnoses? Some crazy cold virus that combined with his ear infection to cause fevers that accelerated his breathing, the mucus that may have caused the low oxygen levels, and the loss of appetite that landed us here in the first place.

Meal times was a nice short break to the endless rounds of trying to occupy Jameson in a teeny tiny space. He started eating some again, and seemed to enjoy playing with his lunch.

We also got some toys from their playroom which Jameson enjoyed for what seemed like a very brief time. He particularly likes stacking toys right now and there was one that he really enjoyed there.

Thankfully, Aunt Melissa came over later that day for a brief visit. Jameson loved brushing her hair. And his own hair for that matter; he’s very into the hairbrush recently.

She also got me out of his room for a little while. I had come in from the back when I arrived with Jameson on Saturday, so I had no idea where anything was. We went down to the lobby so I could get an official badge and walked around the cafeteria. The hospital is actually very nice, and it’s really too bad Jameson couldn’t leave his room because there were plenty of things he would’ve loved to see.

Aunt Melissa also brought some teethers for Jameson, which aside from the pacifier (woe that we discontinued it just a few weeks prior), frozen or cold teethers are the only thing that will calm Jameson down for a little bit.

She left us then with a relatively happier baby. It wasn’t long after that that Grandma and Grandpa arrived, freshly back from a weekend getaway. They were thrilled to see him, despite him wailing away when they walked in the room. We were happy to leave him in their hands for a little while and prep his dinner (and eat our own : Jimmy John’s Vito sandwhich for lunch AND dinner! awesome!).

Jameson still hadn’t drank any milk yet, but he was drinking more apple juice from a bottle. Spoiled baby ๐Ÿ™‚

Jameson wasn’t too interested in dinner, but he did enjoy sipping water from a straw, which was cute. He kept trying to throw food on the ground, except there was no puppy to pick it up, sigh…

Around this time, our roommate was released, which was nice since we had visitors we were able to open up the curtains and move around the room more freely. They wanted to keep Jameson overnight one more night to see how he did without oxygen all night long, so I was also excited about the prospect of sleeping that night without the constant annoyance of IV alarms going off like they had the night prior.

Around Jameson’s bedtime, we chased out grandma and grandpa and tried to get him to sleep.

It was, in a word, LONG.

Brian and I sang songs for, it must have been, 45 minutes before Jameson fell asleep. And I say songs, I really mean the 2 songs that we both knew (Rock-a-Bye Baby and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star), interspersed with a couple other songs that I knew.

Jameson finally fell asleep though, and I was thrilled that he went into the “jail crib” without any problems!

He actually slept in there almost all night. It was such a relief compared to the hours we spent awake the night before. He woke up around 3, but fell back asleep on me within a half hour, and I moved him back to the crib without difficulty. When Brian arrived in the morning, we were sleeping separately, soundly.

The crib rails actually go up and down rather than the bed itself (so they can easily access babies in an emergency). It is a kind of clever set up.

We knew we would be going home in the morning, but we should’ve realized that hospitals are slow. We finally were discharged around 10:30 or so, 3-1/2 hours after we started talking about getting released. The good news is, Jameson finally started drinking milk again!

All in all? The nurses were nice. We had one nurse, Shane, who was there every day, so there was some consistency. We had very friendly lady nurses overnight. I’m sure they considered us pretty easy patients, though we felt like Jameson was anything but easy.

Shane removed Jameson’s IV when it was time to go. Jameson wailed away and then paused for a minute, watching again as he removed it.

We weren’t sorry to leave that room, that’s for sure. It was such a relief, since we had arrived expecting pneumonia and ear infection and left with nothing but a bad cold virus.

We got home, and in a couple hours we put Jameson down for a nap. When he got up, we decided to go out and run some errands rather than being cooped up in the house the rest of the day (I had been stir crazy all weekend). We stopped at the elementary school playground which Jameson loved.

He’s very into the flowers right now and has me pick them for him to hold on to. Sometimes he tries to eat the stems and I have to take them away, but the delight on his face when I hand them to him make me keep giving them.

And that’s it, a happy end to a relatively unhappy weekend. It really put some perspective on the value of health and made me feel blessed that we didn’t need to be there longer for anything more serious. Very blessed.

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2 Comments

    1. Me too! It’s amazing how quickly he seemed to feel better! He was even back at daycare yesterday, barely coughing, drinking his bottles again like a champ.

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