Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Where's Clooney when you need him?
What a night! I came home early to assist Kristin wth Parker, who had been getting increasingly fussy during the day. His cold was getting worse, and he was beginning to show signs of another cold-induced asthma attack. Alarmingly, his abuterol treatments were seeming to have little effect, despite decreasing the time between them, the last two having only been an hour apart. On advice from the pediatrician, we took Parker to the emergency room at Shands, where we preceeded to spend the next three hours. Parker had a high fever, which was brought down with Motrin, and then given a quadruple nebulizer treatment and enough Baby Steroids to turn him into a miniature Ah-nold. He also received chest x-rays in a bizarre test tube looking device that surprisingly did not make him scream as much as I thought it would.
And how did Parker take it all? He alternated betwwen extreme happiness (probably brought about by the hyperactive side effects of massive doses of Abuterol) and estreme fussiness (he had a fever, darnit, and it was past his bedtime). He waved at everyone is the hall, and clapped with Congress at the State of the Union. Then he mashed french fries into the floor and called the ER Nurse station for no particular reason. In the end, however, his doctors (we had a new doctor for each hour of our stay, plus one to boot!) decided that he did not need to be sent to the ICU, and could come home with us.
We had a hasty, poorly made meal from my previous Employer (and I thought my night time Wendy's crew was bad) and drove to the drive-thru pharmacy (I can get drugs? From my car window? What a country!!). As we drove up, we startled what looked to be a snd piper that flew straight up into the roof of the driveway and fell like a stone to the ground. About a minute later it jumped up and skeedadled out of our way. I guess it decided it wasn't ready to fly at night. Parker fell asleep on the way home. I'm now going to follow suit, so I can pull a reasonable impersonation of a Zombie at tomorrow's office meetings.
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