By Mommy

I figure this entry shouldn’t start with those dreaded words “first of all, everyone is okay.”  This was not a pleasant weekend for anyone in the Rowan household, but in the end everyone really is okay.

First a quick timeline:

Sunday 8am: Rowan has a temp of 101.4 so we gave him some Advil

2:20pm: Temp is up to 102.7.  Called doctor who said to give him acetaminophen as well.

3:00: Temp at 102.2

7:15: Temp is again 102.7.  Mommy gets a bad feeling and asks Mitch to get the carseat from storage and make sure the diaper bag is stocked.  Called doctor again.  Got go-ahead to give more medicine.

7:30: I’m seated and holding Rowan while Mitch tries to give Rowan the medicine.  Rowan scrunches his face in refusal and cries, then suddenly stiffens, his eyes go weird, and his upper body starts jerking up and down.  I cry out that he’s having a seizure and Mitch calls 911.  I just keep holding Rowan in my arms since I was too afraid to move him to his crib, that he would jerk right out of my hands and onto the floor.  It was the longest two minutes of our lives.  But the next part was what scared me the most.  You don’t know what terror is until you feel your child go completely and utterly limp in your arms. Not asleep limp, but absolutely no muscle tone.  He was worse than a rag doll.

I couldn’t even tell if he was breathing, and in the span of one second my brain freezes, comes to life enough to realize that I have to go through the ABC’s of infant CPR, and yell out to Mitch that I don’t know if he’s breathing or if he choked on something while seizing.  Mitch said the obvious but very much needed “do the choking maneuver on him.”  So I flipped him onto his stomach across my lap and give his back a thud.  It’s enough to wake him up and he starts whimpering.  While we’re getting ready for EMS to arrive, I call the doctor to tell her what happened, and she said to also call while we’re en route.

Mitch and I run downstairs with Rowan, the diaper bag, our bags, and nothing else.  By now Rowan has been stripped down to his diaper and EMS is just arriving.  One of the boardmembers walks in to the building at the same time and asks “do you have a blanket for him?”  I had the presence of mind to ask Mitch to pack an extra outfit for Rowan, but couldn’t even think to bring anything to carry him in.  She gives Rowan her coat while EMS checks him over and I run back up for blankets.

We get in the ambulance, and Rowan is now in Mitch’s arms, dazed and shivering.  The pediatrician had called ahead to the hospital, so we were seen right away.  His temperature at that point was 104.5 (up almost 2 degrees in half an hour), so they quickly gave him ibuprofen to bring it down and put us in another room for testing.  Lungs, ears, and throat were clear, but they still had to check that he didn’t have a bladder infection.

It’s bad enough watching your infant son getting a catheter inserted, but it’s worse when it’s being done by a resident who is being guided and encouraged by a nurse.  (A doctor was there as well, but he was holding Rowan’s head.)  After an incredibly long tube went in and was extracted, we were finally able to let Rowan sleep while waiting for the results.  He looked so innocent and helpless, lying on his side, thumb in mouth, half covered by a blankie and nothing else.

The preliminary test came back negative, so we were allowed to go home.  Rowan, completely exhausted, fell right to sleep.  His mommy slept on the floor next to his crib.

The next day he went for a follow-up and was absolutely chipper.  After the nurse took off his clothes and weighed him (21lbs), she put him back on the table and said I could cover him in a blanket, which I did.  And Rowan chooses that moment to, for the first time with me, play peekaboo with a blankie!  The fever was obviously down at that point, and he was in good shape with nothing obviously causing it, so it was chalked up to a virus and told to run its course.  The only exception is that now we can’t wait to see if a mild fever resolves itself.  First sign of one, we have to bring it down right away.

In hindsight, if this had to happen, it happened under the best possible circumstances.  We were there when it did, he was being held by one of us, we recognized it as a seizure and knew how to react, and the doctor on call took what I had to say seriously every time I called.  Imagine if this happened in the middle of the night and his temperature kept rising without anyone knowing.  By the way, an infant seizure looks nothing like what we see adults having in the movies.  In some ways it’s much more subtle and you could almost mistake it for a temper tantrum.

One thing the doctor said to me at the follow-up was to listen to my maternal instincts.  I’ve always hated that kind of advice, but when I think back on it, that’s exactly what happened.  On Saturday morning I told Mitch that Rowan seemed “sad.”  After observing him for a few minutes, Mitch saw what I meant.  That night he puked for the first time ever, which I noted but told myself was the carrots disagreeing with him.  And since I’m not the type to panic or make a big deal out of things, when I asked Mitch to bring the carseat, he took me seriously and didn’t assume I was over-reacting.

In many ways we may be bumbling parents, but at least this time we did the right thing when it really mattered.  Rowan has a lot of trials ahead of him, and I sincerely hope we are as lucky with them as we were with this one.  He still has an intermittent fever but always reverts back to himself when it’s down.  In fact, yesterday the baby-sitter (she came in even though Mommy was home, but after two nights of very little sleep needed a good nap) took him to the Alice in Wonderland statue in the park and was making faces in front of it, and he started laughing and clapping and everyone else was enjoying watching his sheer unadulterated joy rather than the statue.  Rowan definitely has his bad moments, but his underlying nature still is to be happy and expressive.  We hope no illness or experience will take that away from him.

Just because