High Fever

Friday around 11:30 AM, I got a call from Gateway that Emily had a fever of 101.5 and wasn't feeling well. I had a 12:30 meeting at work that I had to keep, so I called Mick and he went to pick up Emily and bring her home. He gave her some ibuprofen and she went down for a nap.

When my meeting was over at 1:00, I left and headed home so Mick could go back to work. Emily slept from about 12:45 until about 3:00 and seemed to feel better when she got up. She ate some lunch (she hadn't really eaten at school) and wanted to play.

As the afternoon wore on, she faded some---by around 5:30, she was acting a little sluggish and wanted to snuggle, so I held her and rocked her. She fell asleep in my lap for about 45 minutes, and by the time she woke up, I could tell her fever was higher. Mick got home around 6:30 and she was acting even more lethargic. We gave her some acetaminophen and took her temperature--it was 103.8 and Mick really wanted to go to the hospital. I wasn't as adamant about it since I had seen the way she was acting all afternoon, and was convinced there wasn't anything seriously wrong with her. Still, we'd never seen her act the way she was, and the medicine wasn't bringing the fever down, so we decided to head to the ER.

We got there at 8:00 PM and got in to see a doctor around 8:20--they took her temperature and it was 104. They gave her a big dose of ibuprofen, and then said they wanted to test her urine for infections, so they had to use a catheter (this was the toughest part for all of us). It took three of us to hold her down, but they were pretty quick and she settled down when they left. They couldn't find any infection, and she had no other symptoms aside from the fever.

We were there about 2 hours and ultimately didn't find out much, other than she was okay and we just needed to keep alternating the ibuprofen and acetaminophen, since the fever was probably caused by a virus and would last 48-72 hours.

Poor little Em was so tired that she finally fell asleep on the way home, and was in her bed by around 10:45 PM. She slept until after 8:00 AM this morning, and then took a 3 hour nap this afternoon! She had a pretty good day today, but still had a fever of almost 101 when she went to bed, even though we've kept the medicine in her system all day.

We're hoping she's feeling much better by tomorrow.