We are a pretty happy and healthy bunch in our household. Life is good. My husband and I love our careers. We (usually) enjoy being with our kids. Our family of five is active, energetic, and generally full of fun. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact it was quite the opposite.
A few years ago our oldest daughter, Etta Marie, was very sick and no one (including a ton of specialists) knew what was wrong. This is the Part One of her story (AKA How my daughter’s sickness led to our family’s health).
The First Fever
Etta usually woke up multiple times throughout the night, crying until I nursed her back to sleep. I was certain she was trying to kill me with sleep deprivation as she woke up so often and I slept so little. However, this particular night she was actually sleeping. You’d think I would enjoy a night of calmness, but I just laid there thinking I should go check on her again for what seemed like the 100th time. I just had a weird feeling something was wrong.
She was sleeping well and didn’t even feel warm when I checked her at 2:00 am. But two hours later when I peered down into her crib her eyes were wide open. She was laying there listlessly just giving me a blank stare. Her little face was illuminated by the glow of the nightlight and I could tell in her eyes that something wasn’t right.
When I lowered my hand to her forehead I could feel the heat radiating from her body before I even touched her skin. I grabbed the thermometer and checked her temperature.
105.6. I thought for sure there is no way that could be correct so I retook it. 105.8 was the second reading. I didn’t even know a temperature could go that high and like any normal person would do, I freaked out big time. I scooped her up in my arms and ran into our bedroom waking my husband with my panic-filled cries of hysteria.
The Emergency Room
The next thing I recall we were in the ER waiting in one of those areas that are made private by pulling a curtain around the parameter of the bed. Nurses were frantically giving her syringes full of Motrin and Tylenol.
The ER Experience
I remember giving the doctor Etta’s background info and him asking if she had fevers often.
“Never. This is her first one. In fact, she has never been sick before in her life. No ear infections, no colds, no coughs. Nothing”.
He seemed surprised by this but I couldn’t tell if he was impressed by her strong immunity or whether he thought I was a crazy and incompetent mother who couldn’t tell when my child was sick . Obviously, she had to have been sick prior to this. No baby goes 13 months without some kind of illness, right?
Other than her being a very fussy baby, she was healthy. She cried a lot and hardly ever slept, but she was never sick.
He continued to ask questions like “Has anyone in your family returned from traveling out of the country in the last two weeks?” and “When was the last time your husband was deployed to a third world country?”
I told him nothing was out of the ordinary. In fact she had just been to her one year well child check up and everything was fine.
At one point the nursing staff gave her a red popsicle and I remember how it melted down her chin and stained her hospital gown. I kept thinking “Geez. You would think they wouldn’t give out a color that made it look like gobs of blood dripping everywhere.” Every time a nurse walked in her eyes got all huge and she looked panicked for a second until she realized it was just the popsicle juice that was running from Etta’s mouth.
The Initial Diagnosis
After her fever came down to 102 (it never went any lower despite the meds) we waited around a few hours just to be sure everything was okay.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we received her diagnosis. It was assumed to be just a virus and there was no treatment. We just had to let it run its course.
We were relieved, but also confused. Where did she pick up a virus? We hadn’t been anywhere in the past few days. She wasn’t in daycare and there hadn’t been anyone over to visit. It felt strange to me, but I thought this was a one-time occurrence and everything would be fine.
The Next Year
Well, I was way off base with that thought because over the next 10 months, Etta had five more of these fever episodes. They lasted anywhere from 2-8 days and they always happened the same way. Very high fever spikes out nowhere. Usually anywhere from 104 to 106.
It occurred often enough that something inside of me was like “umm….this isn’t right”. That maternal intuition was whispering to me that something was wrong, but I just brushed it aside because the doctors didn’t seem worried (which is a terrible idea BTW, you should ALWAYS listen to your instincts as I would later find out.).
Right after Etta turned two (just shy of a year after her first fever) we made a big move across the country from Seattle to Virginia so my husband could attend grad school. It was during that time when things really started to heat up (see what I did there? Fever, heat up).
Click HERE to read to part two of Etta’s story.