Saturday night, six days after we had Hannah, Cathy and I went to bed about midnight after having a terrific time entertaining friends much of the afternoon and evening. Cathy, who up to that time had been perfectly fine, suddenly became very hot and stated shaking. I prayed for her and she stopped shaking, but she still was awfully warm... her temperature was about 102° and didn't go down. Our doctor had mentioned to us that there is a small risk of meningitis with an epidural, so I popped on Wikipedia and looked it up. Sure enough, a fever is one of the classic three symptoms (the others being a headache and a stiff neck). I gave her some of the strong ibuprofen that the doctor had prescribed for the back pain she had been having since the birth, hoping that would bring the fever down. When it did not (in fact, the fever went up to 103° at one point) I called the on-call doctor. She asked me a number of questions, and then recommended that we go in to the emergency room for some testing. She didn't think that there was any reason to panic, but to be safe she recommended tests. She even told me that it was OK to wait until morning for the kid's night's rest sake, so we toughed it out for the night and waited for morning. In the morning we called my mom and dad and they came over to take care of Mikey and Hannah, and Cathy and I went off to the ER at SouthCrest.
Being in the ER is never a "short story," but to try and make it shorter, we found out that it was likely nothing. Although Cathy actually did have some neck pain and a mild headache, her symptoms were not severe (even the temperature had gone down under 100° within a few hours). The doctor offered to do a spinal tap (apparently that is the only way to positively diagnose meningitis) or to release us and we would wait and see if it got worse, with the understanding that if the symptoms got worse, we would immediately come back to the ER and get that spinal tap. We elected to follow the "wait and see" approach, hoping that maybe Cathy just needed some rest overnight. They gave us a scrip for some antibiotics and we headed home to see our baby! My mom and dad offered to let us stay over for the night so we could rest; Mom even said she would do the every-two-hours feedings for us so we could sleep uninterrupted. We sure took them up on that one! So outside of getting up a few times to run the breast pump, Cathy got a good night's sleep and I did too. The symptoms diminished and today (Christmas Eve) she is pretty much back to her regular self. Praise the Lord! :)
For the record... we asked the ER doctor, and he told us that in order to cause any kind of permanent damage, your fever has to go up into the 107° range or so. So it was definitely something to keep track of, but she wasn't really in danger of drain bramage or anything at that level. (whew!)
So it's Christmas Eve! I want to wish both of my readers a wonderful Christmas, a terrific new year, many blessings, and happy holidays. :) And hey... if you haven't been watching the listings from my "Christian" blog (my "journal" on Christdot), don't miss my Christmassy blog post from a few days ago. (There are a few more here and here if you like that one.) Despite what may be your first impressions, they are definitely not anti-Christmas, or really anti-anything. What I do hope is that maybe one of them will get someone thinking about Christmas in a different way. It's easy to get in a "it's Christmas again, same song as last year, different verse" mode, but I think there are a lot of things that deserve a second look. If you disagree with me on any point, feel free to post a comment here or on Christdot.
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