Poor baby

So let's just say that it has been a bad week.  To say the least.  Lemme give you a recap:

Tuesday morning: (around 5 AM - Ted is out of town) - I hear Sam screaming, and I mean screaming, from his bed.  This is completely unlike him and I rush in there to find his bed full of semi-hard piles of vomit and he is dry heaving.  Good morning!

Tuesday all day:  Sam is pathetic. He lays around all day. He throws up here and there - on the floor, on me, in his bed.  You get the drift.  It was an all in all nasty, nasty day.   When it is finally time to put him to bed and I think that maybe, just maybe we are in the clear, I lay him down in his freshly-made bed and he starts holding his stomach and wincing in pain.  He wants me to lay with him so as I am crawling into his bed he vomits - not that there was much to throw up, but I had managed to get some water down him before I put him down.  So then I got to clean him, myself, and the bed again.  Of course I had run out of twin fitted sheets by that time so he slept on a towel. In his diaper.  But he didn't care.  And neither did I.  Poor baby.

Wednesday:  Wednesday was an okay day. He didn't eat, but he didn't throw up either.  He was pretty happy and I even went to work for a few hours. He was playing with Ward and Ann Park that night and acting like himself again. I thought that it was behind us.  I thought wrong.

Thursday:  The diarrhea began.  And did it ever.  Let's just say that it was liquid.  I'll leave it at that.  All those moms out there know what I am talking about and can imagine the number of diapers, pants and shirts (you know how it comes up that back of the diaper?) we went through.  Finally, I just had him in just his diaper.  Even with all this, I was not too worried because I just thought that the bug was running its normal course.

Friday: I get him up and he has a dry diaper.  Bad sign.  He seems a little better and even asks for something to eat.  He really had eaten little to nothing since Monday so I decided to give him part of a banana.  We play in the morning and things are looking up.  But no wet diaper. At lunch time, he again wants to eat and I made him some chicken.  He looks at it, takes one little bite and says he is done.  I gave him a couple of godlfish and again, he eats a few and won't touch anything else.  Then he starts crying.  And holding his tummy, which is hard and distended, and screaming "my tummy hurts, my tummy hurts."  It breaks my heart.  I try to get him calmed down and can't.  Then I think that maybe he is cramping and about to have more diarrhea so I get him on the potty so maybe I won't have to clean up too much.  Well, he started vomiting again - all over himself, me and the floor.  Oh yeah, and still not a wet diaper.

After I got him (and myself) cleaned up, he asked to go take a nap.  That is never a good sign with an active 2 year old, but I knew that he was exhausted and probably had nothing left to go on.  After I put him down I called the doctor and reported the above.  Of course they wanted to see him and we went in at 3:45, where he was lethargic and just sat in my lap.  When they pricked his finger he didn't even flinch, but just layed there like nothing had happened.  The doctor did a full examination and concluded that because of the bug, no eating, etc. his body was producing too much acid and not allowing him to tolerate any food and causing extreme nausea and pain.   She was very concerned about the lack of wet diapers and told me that he needed to pee before I put him to bed or we had to go to Children's Hospital for an IV.

She prescribed Zofran to ease the nausea and then told me to give him 1-2 tsp of sugary liquid every 5 minutes for 2 hours.  Apparently the sugar helps neutralize the acids in his tummy and gets his system working well again.  We did as we were told but then the extreme diarrhea started up again.  That was not one of the scenarios she had given me so I called the after-hours nurse at about 7 last night.  And the diarrhea caused a problem because I could not tell if he had peed.  We kept him up another hour, with the 2 tsp of Gatorade every 5 minutes and then put him to bed and prayed that he would take up with a wet diaper.

Good news is that it was wet, but he also had diarrhea.  Poor little baby.  He is obviously feeling much better this morning though so that is a good sign.  The doctor won't allow him to eat anything for 24 hours which might be a challenge as he starts to feel better.  He went bizerk this morning when he saw the other kids eating, so I gave him a popsicle to try to calm him down, but after eating less than half of it he was done.  I did go against doctor's orders and offered him a cracker but he didn't want it.  Obviously he is not 100% or he would have eaten it and asked for a million more.

So that is where we are now.  Ted just took him to run some errands because it is a nasty, rainy day here.  Ward, Ann Park and our cousin, Katelynn, are upstairs in Ward's room where they made a pretty good fort and are watching a movie inside it.  All in all, we are on the up and up, but mama is exhausted.  Ted and I are supposed to have a date night tonight and I need it.  We will get him down and head out.  I feel some wine coming my way . . . but I also see the bed in my near future.