Well, that was NOT how I wanted to spend my Mother’s day.

Things started to happen on Saturday. Olivia ate a great breakfast and seemed to be in fine spirits. We ran to the mall after gymnastics for a few things and Olivia had a jar of sweet potatoes there. On the way home Maddie Rose started yelling that Olivia was getting sick. Sure enough, the entire jar had come up.

Thinking this was a fluke thing and not wanting to ruin Arnie’s mom’s mother’s day celebration, I decided last minute to take Olivia. I was going to stay home with her while Arnie and Maddie went but I felt bad that Jean wouldn’t be with both her girls.

Olivia slept through most of the dinner in my arms. We got to Arnie’s parents house and after Olivia took a bottle it came right back up! Arnie’s aunt Mary Anne noticed that Olivia was warm so we took her temp (102º via ear thermometer). I was getting nervous at this point and we decided to head home.

Olivia had a bottle of pedialyte before bed and slept well. She woke up at 4:30AM and Arnie gave her some pedialyte and checking her temp (100.5 via ear thermometer). Gave her some tylenol and she went back to sleep until 7AM. At 7AM I took her temp again (103.8 rectally). We paged the pediatrician and waited. Gave Olivia tylenol at 8:15AM

We ended up calling back the pediatrician after no response within an hour and he called us back. After hearing she was a “cardiac” kid with no spleen, the doc on call immediately suggested we head to CCMC’s emergency room. We thought this was a good idea so we dropped Maddie off at my parents and headed up there.

Thankfully the ER was dead so they took us right away. Olivia weighed 18 lbs, 14.5 oz fully dressed (with a sweatshirt on). Her lungs were clear. They did a chest xray to rule out heart failure and also pneumonia. Then came the fun part: Since Olivia has no spleen they are immediately concerned about encapsulated bacteria that she cannot fight. So they wanted to start an IV to give her IV antibiotics and get a current blood count (CBC). They started at 10:30AM. After 8 attempts and 4 different nurses they FINALLY got an IV in at 12:30PM. She ended up getting the antibiotics as two shots in her legs because they didn’t want to wait for the IV to get started. Apparently it’s very common for heart children to have “bad” veins. Poor princess was beyond exhausted at this point.

Now the waiting game for the results for the CBC. We were told that the pediatrician on call for our practice wanted Olivia admitted overnight to keep an eye on her. Finally around 2:30 they told us her white cell count was 15 (anything 5-15 is considered “normal”). We finally moved up to a room on the 7th floor at 3:30pm.

Arnie stayed with Olivia last night. She was able to keep down everything yesterday (mostly pedialyte and then later in the day milk). Olivia slept well and this morning her fever was gone! She is playing and acting like herself.

Now we’re just waiting to hear back on the culture results for the encapsulated bacteria. The first doctor Arnie saw today said they would most likely keep her another night to wait for the 48 hour results but we’re hoping our pediatrician says to send her home. In our opinion she could end up with something worse by staying there and being exposed to all those germs.

I will update again later today as more information is known.