Sick baby

At Kylie's 6-month check-up, one of the vaccinations she was supposed to get was backordered so the nurse told me she would call me when it came in. As promised, she called me last week to set up an appointment for Wednesday the 9th to get the shot. Her appointment was at 2:30 pm, and we were in an out in about 15 minutes. I had to wake Kylie up from her nap to go to the appointment so when we got home after the appointment, I put her back down for a nap. The rest of the day, she was fine, and she went to bed between 8:00 pm and 8:30 pm. Around 10:15 pm, she woke up screaming and was burning up. I gave her some Tylenol and fed her. I took her temperature under her arm while she was eating, and it was almost 102 degrees. I looked over the packet her pediatrician had given me about all the vaccinations, fever, medications, etc. to see at what temperature a fever was a concern. I also looked at several hospitals' web sites about fevers. And to conclude everything I read...usually, there isn't much concern when 6-month-old babies have a fever if they've just gotten a shot (it's a normal reaction to a vaccination, and 1 in 50 babies get a fever over 102.2 after getting the specific vaccination she had gotten that day). The fever should be a concern when the baby has had the fever for more than 3 days or if the temperature is over 104 in the absence of recently getting a shot. Normal rectal temperatures for a baby range up to 100.4 anyway.

So, Kylie spent the next several hours sleeping right next to me, waking up screaming every 15 minutes to 90 minutes. I gave her Tylenol every 4 hours but her rectal temperature got up to 103.8. We finally got out of bed around 10:00 am Thursday morning, and she just looked horrible. She screamed and tensed her muscles every time I picked her up or moved her. She would barely eat anything. Her termperature got down to about 100 once but kept going back up. I wasn't so much concerned about her fever as I was concerned about her acting like she was in so much pain. I called her pediatrician's office around 12:30 pm and was told the nurse would call me back. I hadn't gotten a call back at 4:30 pm so I called back. The nurse told me the pediatrician said I should take Kylie to the ER. Even though the fever was normal, it wasn't reacting to medication, and the whole-body pain was not normal.

We spent 3 hours in the waiting room. What a nightmare! After a bunch of screaming, a dose of Motrin, a Tylenol suppository, a catheter and urine test, a couple of chest x-rays, a "booger test," a blue raspberry popsicle, and 2 1/2 hours in the hospital room, the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with her. All the tests and x-rays came back negative (thankfully!). Her fever finally broke, and her temperature was 98.3 right before we left. The doctors discharged us with instructions to alternate Tylenol and Motrin every 3 hours.

Last night Kylie went to bed soon after we got home (almost midnight) and slept until 10:00 this morning. She woke up back to her old self, thank goodness! Her pediatrician called to schedule a follow-up appointment for this afternoon. She looked Kylie over and determined that she'd probably just had a bad reaction to the vaccine, and she told me she would report the reaction and Kylie will never get that vaccine again. She noticed some weird dots on her (I'd noticed a couple of the dots above her eyes last night at the hospital but thought it was busted blood vessels from screaming so much) and said there is a sickness going around and that she has seen those dots on several other patients. She didn't suspect Kylie had that sickness, though, because she didn't display any of the other symptoms.

While doing a routine reflex check, the pediatrician noticed something wasn't right. She told me to stand Kylie up on the bed, and she noticed Kylie wasn't standing on her whole foot. She gave me a couple of possible reasons for its cause, and I have found a couple more online. She's going to set us up with a physical therapist and see how everything works out with that. And if that doesn't fix it, she will refer us to a neurologist. Please pray physical therapy is effective!